My Big Fat Greek Vacation

1. My Band Went to the Olympics and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

2006-02-10T17:57:00.000-08:00

But who did bid thee join with us?
——Macbeth, III.iii

This is a tale that must be told.

It's old news by now, but still instructive, possibly even entertaining. I had hoped to tell this story to parties who might actually take measures to correct what happened, but I don't know how to contact those parties.

The story you are about to read is true. Some of the names have been changed, to protect my hide if anyone gets upset. Aspiring Christian musicians are free to use this information to help them decide how they should or shouldn't behave on tour, and what they will or won't tolerate from the people they choose to work with. They're also free to completely ignore this information and learn their lessons in the school of hard knocks.

It all began in the summer of 2003 with an e-mail from an individual I'll call B. He's a former worship pastor for one of those Gen-X, postmodern "emergent churches," and a few years ago he put out a highly respected worship CD. I played as a guest musician with his band exactly one time, in 1999 or so. It was a lot of fun, but that was all it took for me to realize that I don't relate to emergent churches. Nothing against them, but they're not my cup of tea. Chronologically I'm Gen-X, but in terms of culture, philosophy, and values I'm quite different from most people my age. But I digress.

B. remembered my one-time guest shot with his worship band. In the four years since then, he'd left that particular church to help plant another one, moved around a bit, and gotten involved with another music project that was taking him to fun locations like the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and several places in Honolulu (one of those, the X Factory, is a youth center in a former kim-chi plant where I once played a set with Ric Blair. But I digress.) This new band was called Loudmouth Worshippers. They'd be going to Athens to play at the 2004 Summer Olympics, and they needed a musician like me to give their sound a more ethnic flavor (I play fiddle, mandolin, and several variations thereof, if you hadn't gathered that already).

Was I interested?

Well, wouldn't you be?

Part 2

2. How Can I Make Repressed Memory Syndrome Work for Me?

2006-02-10T17:56:00.000-08:00

There was more foolery yet, if I could remember it.
——Julius Caesar, I.ii

I remember a mass of things, but nothing distinctly.
——Othello, II.iii

Do you ever look back on moments in your life and wish you’d been taking notes?

What I'm getting at is this. In every life there are a few times when one says to oneself, “I am going to remember this as long as I live.” The death of a pet, or, God forbid, a family member. Getting your driver’s license. Graduation. Your first job. Getting married. The birth of your first child. Et cetera. And that's nice, but chances are that those aren't the moments you'll actually need to remember. No, those moments, more often than not, seem trivial and mundane when they're happening. At the time, of course, you have no awareness of their future importance. Then, days or months or years later, you're left scratching your head and asking yourself, "Now what exactly did so-and-so say to me?" I remember my anniversary, but quite often in my marriage, that fact has been less important than whether I remembered to pick up margarine at the grocery store.

Which more or less brings me to my point: There are things I'm going to relate in this tale that I wish I could remember better. For example, I'm not entirely sure about everything that happened the first time I met Q.

Q. was the manager/executive producer for the band, Loudmouth Worshippers, that B. had invited me to join. (I hope this anonymity thing doesn't make my story too confusing. I've racked my brain for a nickname for this guy, and Q. is as good as anything else. It reminds me of the meddlesome, omnipotent being portrayed by John De Lancie on "Star Trek: The Next Generation." The Q. in my story wasn't suave or brilliant like that character, but he was meddlesome, and seemed to think himself omnipotent.) After I had declared my interest and exchanged a couple of phone calls with Q., I was invited to a recording session.

You know, I'm not going to tell you Q.'s name,* but I'll tell you a little bit about him. He runs a Bible software company, but at present I'm not sure how active it is. Its Web site has been little more than a placeholder since March 2005. He also has an independent record label, but so far the only projects he's officially released are compilation CDs. Several artists and bands have been "signed" to his label at one time or another, but as far as I know, he has yet to release a full-length CD by any of them. He also purports to run a film production company, and I guess we'll just have to wait and see whether the film he's working on ever gets finished.

To earn his daily bread, Q. runs a small company that purchases and resells secondhand office equipment. I'm sorry I can't be more forthcoming about his identity, but we've all seen what happens to people who leak too much information. However, if you're a young worship musician who's recruited to play at the Olympics with the next hot band in Christian music by someone who seems to fit my description of Q., here's my advice: read every word of every post on this blog. Then and only then will you have the information you need to make your decision. And if you don't decide to run screaming for the hills, at least you can't say later that I didn't warn you. But I digress.

Now where was I? The recording session was to be in a studio on the campus of a church in North Seattle. I remember wandering about the grounds carrying four or five instruments and talking to Q. on a cell phone until I figured out which building it was. Q., his wife, E. (OK, that's enough initials), and B. were there, and there might have been one or two more band members. I am pretty sure that things seemed disorganized, because that's how all the recording sessions were: charts missing or in the wrong key or not having all the chords; working on songs that weren't on the list I was given before the session; being told, "Oh, we're going to redo some of those rhythm tracks you're playing with" or "We're going to add a cello to this" (in which case it was impossible to know how my own tracks would fit in with the final project); and lacking a sense of what the arrangement was or what the style should be for each song.

In the first session and the several that followed, I was often playing on songs or arrangements I had never heard before — which can be OK if the charts are accurate and the arrangement and style are understood, and a big waste of time if they're not. Pro session players quite often record stuff they don't know, and many of them are good enough to nail it on the first take. I wish I were that caliber of player, but I'm not.

(In all fairness, I must say I've played on worse sessions. The worst was probably the first one I ever did, for a singer-songwriter in L.A. [this one, if you're wondering]. Our time slot at the studio began at midnight, because it was cheaper then. She was a completely self-taught musician and fairly talented, but she had no musical vocabulary and neither did her engineer. I don't even remember whether her charts had any chords on them. Not a problem if you've got a great ear, but I don't — I have a so-so ear. Anyway, she didn't like what I was playing, but she lacked the capacity to tell me what she wanted me to change. I think I tried for about three hours before I gave up and went home, and in that period we might have gotten 30 seconds of tape that ended up on the CD. But I digress.)

Q. himself was nearly as deficient in musical vocabulary as that singer-songwriter was, but his engineers seemed to know their stuff, and B. was often around to show me things on the guitar if I had questions. Did I mention that B. had written most of the band's songs and that I've always respected his songwriting? Well, more later about that. And more later on what I couldn't have known at the first session: that no matter how much I and the other band members worked on recording the songs, many of them would never sound finished, because Q. was forever pulling out tracks and replacing them with others as we went along.

In later sessions it became clear that Q. was not fond of Celtic-style ornamentation on fiddle solos, which is a shame because they're part of how I play. I had to very conscientiously avoid such ornamentation, which was difficult for me. I played a viola solo on "Be Thou My Vision" and the engineer kept reminding me to leave the Irish stuff out. I wanted to say, in my best Hibernian brogue, "Are you bollocks? It's an Irish hymn, for the love of God," but I didn't. Also, at the second session, I met some of the other band members (at least I think they were members when I met them — but more later about that). I broke into a bit of a hornpipe on the mandolin (not while the tape was rolling), and one of the people I'd just met made a wisecrack about dancing leprechauns.

What I don't remember about these sessions is at which one of them Q. told me about Jimmy & the Pullet Pluckers. And I don't remember exactly what he said, which is unfortunate, because it turned out to be one of those moments when I should have been taking notes.

For the uninitiated, Jimmy & the Pullet Pluckers** is a Christian band from Nashville formed during the recent "swing revival" craze. If you called them the CCM counterpart of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, you wouldn't be far off. But while most swing revival bands have gone the way of Sinatra, the Pullet Pluckers are still going strong, which says something either about their talent and perseverance or about the CCM market's failure to recognize when trends are over. (Please don't get the wrong idea — I would rather listen to swing music than just about anything on modern pop or rock radio.)

But I digress. I had heard of the Pullet Pluckers, although I didn't know their music, so I was impressed when Q. told me they were "one of our bands." That's the only phrase I recall well enough to put in quotes. I remember getting the distinct impression that Q. was claiming to be their manager and/or the one responsible for starting the band. I would later learn that this impression was false. (You can check the band's Web site to see who their manager and founding members are. No mention of Q. there.) But, you will recall, I wasn't taking notes.

In retrospect, it seems unlikely that Q. stated an outright falsehood. The incident was probably an early manifestation of two of Q.'s particular gifts: 1) exaggeration; 2) making vague statements that could be interpreted a number of different ways, but were nonetheless calculated to reflect positively on him and increase his legitimacy in the mind of the listener.

Now if I hadn't been such a gullible chap, I could have gone to the Pullet Pluckers' Web site while his remarks were still fresh in my mind, there corrected my impression, and perhaps even cleared up the misunderstanding. But I did none of those things. It would be at least a year before I discovered the precise nature of Q.'s relationship with Jimmy & the Pullet Pluckers. More later about that. In the meantime I was determined to be part of this band and go with them to the Olympics — snide remarks about leprechauns notwithstanding.

So what's today's lesson, kids? One of two things: either (a) carry a notepad with you at all times and write down what people say to you, because you might need to recall it later on; or (b) if someone tells you something about himself that sounds both impressive and verifiable, by all means do try to verify it — especially if you will be placing significant trust in this individual in the future. If you succeed in verifying the claim, the individual will look all the more impressive because of his truthfulness. If you succeed in disproving the claim, then you will know you should either ask for clarification or put your trust elsewhere.

*For some reason Q. himself uses a pseudonym in letters to the editor as well as in press releases on his own Web site.

**To protect the innocent, I'll do what I can to ensure that the names of actual, existing, legitimate music ministries are not dragged unnecessarily into the story.

3. Crossing the Continental Divide

2006-02-10T17:55:00.000-08:00

Now, by the gods, I pity his misfortune,
And will awake him from his melancholy.
——Pericles, II.iii

I wanna begin this post by telling you a little about me, just so's you'll know where I'm comin' from. I am thirty-five years old, I am thrice divorced, and I live in a van down by the ...

Wait a sec.

Well, I did turn 35 a few months after going to Athens, but forget the rest of that. I just figured that since my Hellenic debacle was not my first experience with touring music ministry, it might do some good to talk about one of my other such experiences, for the sake of comparison. Just so's you'll know where I'm comin' from.

One fine spring day in 1989 I sat down on my bed in my college dorm room and narrowed my summer options down to two alternatives:
(a) commit suicide or (b) audition for Continental Singers. I then chose (b), figuring that if it didn't work out, I would still have (a) to fall back on. I guess that means (a) was my Plan B.

The most succinct way to describe the Continental Singers is "the Christian Up With People." They send groups around the world performing CCM songs in a "show choir" format, with video, lights, bright costumes, and choreography. I grew up attending Continentals concerts at my church, and had always harbored a desire to join them. The music is undeniably bland by a critic's standards — but you must understand that Continentals perform mostly in churches, many of which are rather conservative, and they have to choose material that won't give too much offense. By age 19 I wasn't exactly a big fan of the music they perform, but I still wanted to go on one of their tours. This may explain why I chose to audition as an instrumentalist rather than a singer.

To truncate a tome (a phrase which here means "to make a long story short"), I was accepted as the third-chair violist in the Continental Orchestra (the only one of their groups with string players) and spent the summer playing around the United States and Europe. It saved my life.

Surely you haven't forgotten (a) from an earlier paragraph — I was suicidal, and suicidal people tend not to have positive or cooperative attitudes. I have no doubt that I was a complete pain in the rear for my tour director during rehearsal camp and the first leg of the tour. But our bus that summer was a microcosm of Christian community, and the support I received from my leaders and tourmates pulled me out of my depression and gave me a renewed sense of self-worth that I've never lost since then — although I've been in plenty of situations that brought it under attack (more later about that). So I don't care what you think of Continentals' music; what they did for me is far more important than a matter of taste.

At the beginning I didn't have such a high opinion of our leaders (but, you will remember, I had problems of my own). I even met once or twice early in the tour with a group of six or eight disgruntled musicians who wanted to propose some changes in the way things were run. I'm pretty sure that our director listened fairly to our proposals and rejected most of them, if not all. But I've forgotten what they were. Over the course of the tour, the director proved himself, by his behavior, to be a person of unimpeachable integrity. And because of this, our objections ceased to matter (to me, at least) long before the summer was over.

Here are a few things the Continentals did right:

We attended a week-long rehearsal camp before we hit the road, which gave everyone time to learn the music and choreography and start to form relationships.
Our light tech and sound tech were part of the team. They trained along with us at rehearsal camp, and planned in advance for our equipment needs.
The leaders made an effort to personally engage every group member, one on one, and get to know what made them tick. I am sure this was not easy for them in my case.
If the leaders felt any self-doubt about their leadership ability, they didn't tell the group about such doubts. If they made mistakes, they did it with confidence. If their decisions bore an explanation, they gave one, within reason.
The leaders sacrificed their personal comfort and convenience for the benefit of the group. They set examples for us by being on time for every call, keeping their cool in tight situations, and treating us fairly and graciously while nonetheless maintaining strict boundaries. There were times my tour director was brusque with me, but it's not as though I didn't give him cause. Eventually we earned each other's respect.
The leaders themselves were musicians. Our director was a trumpet player; his wife was a vocalist; and our three assistant directors were a vocalist, a French horn player, and a violinist.
Expectations were clear. There were rules for what you wore, what you did with your free time and your time on the bus, what you did during setup, performance, and tear-down, and how you behaved around your host families. Every day had a schedule and it was given to everyone first thing in the morning. The tour itself also had a schedule, and it was given to everyone before we hit the road. You knew where you'd be playing every night.
Each day was structured to include some down time, even if it meant just taking a nap on the bus. Some days included free time or activity time, schedule permitting, even if it meant just stopping at a shopping mall for a few hours. But you knew in advance when you were going to have free time, when it would begin, and when it would end.
Every day included at least 90 minutes of sound check/rehearsal/warmup before the gig.
Spiritual disciplines (group prayer and Bible reading) were practiced consistently, with gusto. We sang together in private as well as on stage.
We were fed.

So there are just a few characteristics of a successful touring ministry. You might want to keep them in mind later on, when the Big Fat Greek Vacation actually reaches Greece. At some point we'll ponder whether it's fair of me to judge my experience on the Continent by my experience with the Continentals.

Until then, happy surfing.

4. If the Casket Falls Out Before You Reach the Cemetery, You Just Put It Back In, and That's a ...

2006-02-10T17:54:00.000-08:00

Ha, ha! keep time: how sour sweet music is,
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.
——Richard II, V.v

The foul practice
Hath turn'd itself on me.
——Hamlet, V.ii

Having devoted the previous post to background information, I'll now resume my thrilling narrative. I've talked a bit about recording sessions, which of course are different from rehearsals because the musicians play one at a time instead of all together. Now I'll try to give you an idea of what our rehearsals were like.

In college I had an acquaintance named Alecia. After she graduated, she married a guy named Joe, had a couple of kids, and moved to a house in South Seattle. Our first band rehearsal, on July 19, 2003, turned out to be in her garage, although she wasn't playing in the band. Besides Alecia, there were some other familiar faces: B. was there, along with a percussionist and lead guitarist I'd met at the second recording session. Q. had come along, naturally. There were also some new faces: a bassist and drummer I hadn't met, and a guitarist/vocalist named Holly.

Holly, a few months pregnant at the time I met her, is a worship leader at another of those emergent churches — hers is in West Seattle. She and B. were to be the tandem lead vocalists of Loudmouth Worshippers. (I think there might have been a third guitarist/vocalist at that rehearsal, but if so, he or she disappeared thereafter. More later about that.) Through all that ensued, my wife and I ended up getting to know Holly better than we knew anyone else in the band.

About the rehearsal. We slammed through 10 or 12 charts. B. had written most of the music, and it was good stuff: catchy melodies, chord progressions not too predictable. B. has a talent for taking classic texts (Prayer of St. Francis, the Nicene Creed, the old hymn "Breathe on Me") and finding new melodies for them. And there was a fair amount of intrigue and poetry in his original lyrics. We were doing one classic hymn, "Come Thou Fount," with the original melody. But, as I said, we were slamming through everything. No attention was given to dynamics or arrangements; we didn't go back to rework problem spots; everybody just played as loud as possible, and I tried to find some sonic space for my instruments somewhere. I have mentioned that this band had already played live gigs in Hawaii and Salt Lake City, but at this rehearsal they didn't sound like a band that was used to playing together. Or maybe, I thought, it was just me.

I guess you could point to Robby Steinhardt (Kansas) or John Cale (Velvet Underground) as the first musicians to play amplified violin-family instruments in a rock band. (Of course, people like Bob Wills and Stuff Smith had been using them in jazz and swing for years.) Charles O'Connor of the Horslips also comes to mind. I don't know for sure about the others, but Robby and Kansas figured out two things: you have to have a good pickup and a preamp, or you'll never be heard above electric instruments; and you to have to arrange the music so that the violin sounds like it belongs there. Well, I had one of the best pickup/preamp configurations in the business on both my mandolin and my fiddle: a Fishman bridge pickup, paired with a Crown microphone, run through a Rane AP13 preamp. (Both my AP13s were mounted in a portable rack case, along with a mixer, and I brought them to the three rehearsals and the gig I participated in before we went overseas. More later about that.) But, at least at that rehearsal, we took no time to consider arrangements. I could barely hear myself, and it's hard to arrange what you can't hear.

Of course, there's really no point in working too much on your arrangements for live shows until you have your personnel nailed down. Keep that in mind.

Several weeks later, on August 23, 2003, we held a second rehearsal in Joe and Alecia's garage. In between the two rehearsals I went to Ireland, so in my memory they seem farther apart than they actually were. I remember I was really late for this second one, but I eventually got there. Not much had changed except some of the personnel. We had a new bassist; I don't think the lead guitarist or the phantom third guitarist/vocalist were there; and if I'm not mistaken, we were, like Henry David Thoreau, following a different drummer. Actually, we were following the percussionist, who was filling in on the trap set because the drummer was even later than I was. But if I was expecting that we would work on arrangements this time, I was disappointed — it was just more slamming.

Actually, in retrospect, slamming seemed to be the favored approach for a lot of things in this group — and I'm not just talking about music. I'm talking about the most memorable part of that rehearsal: a spectacular argument between B. and Q., which, if I recall correctly (and again, I should have been taking notes) had something to do with how the band was expected to sound. Q. always said he wanted us to sound like Coldplay — which was a bit of a puzzler for me, because I have never heard Coldplay* and know absolutely nothing about them except that their lead singer is the father of Gwyneth Paltrow's daughter, who is named Apple. I can hear the playground taunts already. Some therapist is going to buy a luxury yacht with the money he gets for having that kid on his couch. But I digress. Frankly, I'm a conflict avoider, I didn't want to listen to the argument, and the rehearsal was pretty much over when it started, so I excused myself from the garage and went home. But before I left I did hear Q. pull rank as the manager/producer/financier/Svengali for the band, and threaten to get rid of B. and everyone else if he didn't get his way.

In other words, it didn't matter that B. had written these songs and performed them hundreds of times in his own church worship bands. It didn't matter that this band had already been out playing gigs. It didn't matter that the person trying to assume the role of musical director (Q.) didn't know a whole note from a hole in the head. It didn't matter that this was a slam-through rehearsal conducted at least partly for the purpose of bringing me up to speed, and therefore it was hardly fair to judge whether the band sounded like Coldplay (at the time it didn't sound like much of anything). It was Q.'s way or the highway, and he could be volatile if he didn't get what he wanted.

So the evidence was there for me to see — but doggone it, I wanted to go to Greece.

Not that I felt personally threatened by Q., or had any arguments with him myself (up to this point). He was always complimentary toward me and my playing. In fact, because I tried to be flexible in recording sessions and give him what he wanted, he took to calling me a "professional studio musician." I didn't endeavor to correct the misconception, because I was flattered by it. It gave me some incentive to behave like a professional, a phrase which here means "Keep your head down, don't make waves, give 'em what they want, and concentrate on playing your best." I've often thought about attempting to be a professional, and have considered joining the local chapter of the American Federation of Musicians. After I got back from Greece, I called the AFM and asked what professional studio musicians charge for their services. I was told the AFM doesn't send anyone out for less than $50 an hour, and there is, I think, a three-hour minimum.**

Wanna guess how much I got paid for my studio time? Zilcho. And I was OK with that. This was ministry, after all, and I was getting a free trip to the Olympics. There is, nonetheless, a certain amount of irony in calling someone a "professional studio musician" when you're not willing to treat him like one.

*Funny, these coincidences — I stopped in Rubato Records tonight to look around, and heard Coldplay for the first time on the in-store sound system. My quick impression: Start with U2 circa October or Boy. Then give Bono a frontal lobotomy so that he can't emote. Next, throw in a piano. You might need to throw it directly at Bono in case the lobotomy doesn't slow him down enough. Voila — you've got Coldplay. I didn't hear any strings, so I don't know how I was supposed to fit into Q.'s concept of our band's sound.

**I think I did six sessions for Q., for a total of about 10 hours of recording time. So my work was worth at least $500 by professional standards — $900 if you apply the three-hour minimum.

5. I'm Gonna Take a Trip on That Good Ol' Gospel Ship

2006-02-10T17:53:00.000-08:00

Most heavenly music!
It nips me unto listening.
——Pericles, V.i.

I'm often asked...

Sometimes asked...

Somebody once asked me...

about my experience with worship music. Why would I want to join a band called Loudmouth Worshippers?

Well, gee ... maybe it's because I had been playing worship music in churches for 13 years (mostly in this one and a couple of years in this one), because I think that's one of the ways God wants me to serve him. And from time to time I'm nagged by the desire to expand my involvement in music that expresses my faith.

(I didn't say "Christian music" because I'm not particularly anxious to be part of the CCM market, or to play the syrupy, repetitive pap with self-centered lyrics and outrageously affected vocals that passes for "worship music" in said market. Furthermore, this doesn't rule out my playing other types of music — I'm not going to give up my chair in Thalia Symphony just because we might play a piece by a composer who wasn't a Christian. Nonetheless, one function of music — although not the only function — is self-expression, and for me, that function is going to include my faith. But I digress.)

I think I've received exactly one negative comment about my playing in worship bands — someone thought I was trying to be a rock star because I move around a lot when I play. That person obviously had a lot of confidence in her ability to determine people's intentions by their actions. (I move around a lot no matter what kind of music I'm playing — I'm easy to spot in the orchestra because I'm the violist who can't sit still.) On the other hand, I've received a lot of praise, the best of which is when people say my playing helps them focus their attention on God. Which is, after all, my goal when I play worship music. I try to play my best, but my intent is to glorify God, not myself. My worship-band playing is improvisational, and it's informed by knowledge of chord progressions, scales, arpeggios, harmony, countermelody, complementary vs. contrary motion, and the mood of the song. In other words, it's just good solid musicianship. No smoke, no mirrors, and nothing up my sleeve. I don't claim any "anointing" or divine inspiration. If other people want to attribute those properties to me, that's fine, but I can't afford to get a swollen head. I refuse to entertain the notion that being a musician makes me more "spiritual" than any other Christian.*

Anyway, I had actually been praying and thinking about whether there was a way for me to get further involved in artistic expression of faith — and then that e-mail from B. arrived. It looked like a good thing at the time — maybe even an answer to prayer. Which, perhaps, is another reason I overlooked Q.'s not-so-commendable attributes and stuck with the project.

Speaking of Q., he never asked for my personal philosophy of worship music, but in an e-mail before the first recording session, he did ask me to provide a letter of reference from my pastor. He wanted the members of Loudmouth Worshippers to be seriously involved with music in their own local churches. And, he said, he was going to visit my church and check out what I was doing there.

It was no problem for me to obtain two letters of reference — one from my pastor in Seattle and another from my former pastor in L.A. And I told Q. he was welcome to drop by my church any Sunday, although he should check with me first, as I play there only every other week.

He never showed up.

In retrospect, I suppose the thing to do would have been to ask Q. for a letter of reference from his pastor. That'd be fair, don't you think? He claimed to attend the church pastored by Casey Treat, which was a bit of an eyebrow-lifter, as I disagree with much of Casey's theology and wonder whether Casey himself isn't a little off the beam. I was determined, however, to be on my best ecumenical behavior, a phrase which here means "cooperate with Q. in the spirit of Christian unity, and don't judge him by the church he attends."

Later I was surprised to learn that (a) Casey was suffering from hepatitis B; and (b) Q. didn't know about it. (I'm sure that Casey's illness must be a bit of an embarrassment to him, since he's known for teaching the "word of faith" doctrine, which claims that illness and poverty are the result of insufficient faith. I do hope that Casey both recovers and rethinks his theology. But I digress.) I'll just say this: I attend church frequently enough to say with some certainty that if my pastor went public with the fact that he had a life-threatening illness, I would know about it.

Anyway, the next time someone says he's going to check up on me, I'll try to do an equal amount of checking up on him.

*If you don't like my thinking on this subject, maybe this guy will be more up your alley. He professes not to have all the answers, but writes as though he does.

6. Broken Promises

2006-02-10T17:52:00.000-08:00

I, that am honest; I, that hold it sin
To break the vow I am engaged in;
I am betray'd, by keeping company
With men like men of inconstancy.
——Love's Labour's Lost, IV.iii

That is a piecrust promise: easily made, easily broken.
——Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins

I can sense your frustration, gentle reader. You feel betrayed. You think an essay whose title includes the words "Greek vacation" should actually contain some description of a Greek vacation. After all, what is a title but an implicit promise about content? And if a person breaks an implicit promise, isn't he not only a liar but a weasel, since he raised your hopes without actually stating the promise? And isn't a manipulative liar worse than a bald-faced one?

Dear reader, I shall try to be neither sort of liar. Everything in this essay is and shall be, to the best of my knowledge, completely factual. When it becomes necessary to disclose facts that do not reflect well on me, I intend to do so. Let me reassure you, I did in fact go to Greece and will attempt to get us there soon. Bear in mind, the preparation took more than a year; the trip itself lasted only two and a half weeks.

But speaking of broken promises, perhaps now would be a good time to tell you what promises were made to me before I stepped on the plane. Or at least what I expected, since in some cases, whether the promises were explicit or implicit depends on other contingencies, such as the meaning of the word "we," for example. So, implicitly or explicitly, Q. and his wife, E. — via conversation, e-mail, and text on their Web site — had fostered within me the following expectations:

That we'd be playing "at the Olympics" in front of "thousands of people" and staying someplace "in the shadow of the Acropolis." Meals, a place to stay, and transportation would be covered. Virgin Megastore would be a corporate sponsor for commercial concert venues.
That Q.'s company and record label would also sponsor performances in Athens by some better-known Christian bands: Switchblade, Feveri$h, Jimmy & the Pullet Pluckers, and Mob Barley. Loudmouth, we were told, was booked to play a concert with the latter two bands. I was impressed. Switchblade and Feveri$h in particular are fairly high-level bands, and they don't work with just anybody. Q., it seemed, had the connections to make an event like this fly.*
That Q. and E. would spring for some Olympic event tickets. Here we must note the difference between an expectation and a promise:

E. sent everyone a link to the Olympic event schedule for Aug. 24–25, comprising some 50 events, and asked us to name the ones we'd most like to see. She wrote, "Even though Q. and I were so busy during the last Olympics in Salt Lake City, we committed to everyone that we would go to an event or two during the next Oly’s in Athens."
1. I guess that since she asked us to choose an event, I assumed she'd do something with the information we gave her — namely, buy tickets.
2. She used the phrase "committed to everyone that we would go." Well, how do you "commit" to go to a ticketed event? Buy tickets.
3. She didn't ask us for money — so logically, who was left to buy the tickets? Q. and E.
4. I assumed most events would sell out well in advance, so it would be smart to buy tickets ahead of time, especially for a large group like ours. (In fact, the Athens Games were rather a disappointment in terms of ticket sales, but no one could have known that beforehand.)
Well, my assumptions might have been logical, but they weren't accurate. E.'s e-mail never said who'd pay for the tickets. And she and Q. did take some band members to an Olympic event, although those who went had to pay for their own tickets. So this counts as a shattered expectation but not as a broken promise.
That Q. had assembled another band called U4ic,** who would be flying over with us. He said I might play with that band as well, and in fact he called me in to record some rhythm tracks and a lead break on tenor guitar for a U4ic song. It was a calypso version of the hymn "Sweet By and By." (Those tracks are probably my only contribution to one of Q.'s musical projects that actually appeared on a release of any kind. But more later about that.***)
That a cellist would join Loudmouth, and she and I would each be expected to prepare a classical solo piece. I gave Q. a copy of my solo CD and sent an e-mail suggesting a couple of pieces I could play and asking which one he liked.****
That the Loudmouth CD would be completed and for sale at the concerts we played — and the band would get some of the money.
That there were some 150 ministries supporting Loudmouth.
That band members would be doing TV and radio interviews. When I asked whether my wife, Sarah, could come along for the trip, Q. suggested that she could be an on-camera coach for the interviews. Later he offered to pay for her transportation as well as mine, as long as I confirmed her availability with him right away. If memory serves, this offer was made toward the end of the week of July 18–24, on Thursday or Friday. I confirmed by e-mail on Saturday, July 24, and by voice mail the following Monday.

I could go on. But now that I think about it, I had reason to believe, even before I went to Greece, that broken promises were something of a behavior pattern with Q. and E. I've already mentioned Q.'s failure to show up at my church. In addition, they repeatedly talked about recording at some cushy studio (this one) with living quarters, hot tubs, and a 9-hole golf course. Since I thought they were just trying to impress me, and I don't particularly care where I record (I made most of my solo CD in the producer's laundry room), the fact that this never happened didn't bother me. Maybe it should have. Q. also waxed rhapsodic to my wife about plans to have our volunteer roadies do a Stomp-style performance at our concerts (as though that wouldn't require talent, training, choreography and a ton of rehearsal). This latter scheme even made its way into a press release, along with many other non-events. Various other teasing tidbits about things "in the works" would crop up in e-mails from E. — working with a Grammy-winning guest producer; gigs in Idaho and New Zealand as well as on Crete and the Greek island of Patmos; staying at Kalamos Youth Center; playing at a Worship Together seminar — and then dissipate into the ether, never to be mentioned again. In fact, this last suggestion seemed to be the occasion of a dramatic flip-flop in Q. and E.'s promotion strategy. Here's an excerpt from an e-mail E. sent on 7/2/2003:

We had several invitations to music fests, events, etc. The one reason we have said "No" is because we want to have CDs for you guys to be able to be compensated for your time.

And here's what she said on 10/7/2003 when she mentioned playing at Worship Together:

I know it may seem weird to you because most independent groups finish their CD project first and then go out there and promote and do concerts and stuff, well not us. We have chosen to get you guys out there promoting in all different avenues with cool opportunities, i.e. radio servicing, radio interviews, TV, concerts, etc. for several months before the release of the CD like the big names do it. By the time your CD hits the street everyone is familiar with who you are.

Did you catch that? The two statements are completely contradictory. It's a 180-degree change in the space of three months! How bizarre is that? Given that we never played at Worship Together or any other such event, the first statement was probably closer to the truth. On the other hand, given that the CD was never released, the second statement was probably closer to the truth. In the end, we got the worst of both worlds: no CD and very little exposure.

So if I've learned anything, I guess it's that people who make false promises about extravagant things (such as studios with golf courses) may be just as likely to make false promises about basic things (such as room and board, performance venues, and whose transportation is covered). And perhaps, having seen that certain promises weren't kept before I went to Greece, I was foolish to expect that other promises would be kept when I got there. However, I can't impute to Q. any sinister motive. He may well have attempted to effect all the things he promised — but if so, many of his attempts failed. He tended to represent deals as done when they really weren't, and to take credit for the work of others.

A very illuminating quote appears on an old version of the Web site for Q.'s record label:

We support and work with a lot of credible, worldwide renowned ministries. We feel in order to keep a ongoing trustworthy relationship with these ministries and future ministries, it is important when looking at adding more people to the team, we keep the high standard of growing a business and ministry where we are all "living a life above reproach" as the Apostle Paul commanded Timothy to all Christians.

Of course, it isn't up to me to judge whether Q.'s behavior meets this standard or not. I'm only here to recite the facts.

*Speaking of connections, Q. not only licensed songs by Jessica Simpson and Moby for a compilation CD, he claimed to know the artists. He also claimed that well-known Christian singers Stinky Cheeseman and Picante Chilipepa were supporting our Greece trip — but I am not sure whether said support was supposed to be financial or emotional. The impression that Q. was working with several bands besides ours seemed to explain why he was sometimes hard to reach, and why his work on the Loudmouth CD was going so slowly. After all, he had many other irons in the fire!

**People like myself who pay attention to words and their meanings will note that "euphoric" usually refers to an artificially induced sense of well-being, such as you might get from drugs. So perhaps it wasn't the best name for a band professing Christianity.

***Here's a chronology of changes to the music section of Q.'s Web site, which rather tends to support the notion that chaos and instability reign at what passes for his record label:

Early March 2005: Loudmouth Worshippers renamed U4ic; U4ic renamed Playpin Junkyard. Makes you wonder who's reading this blog.

April 2005: Q. deletes the music page from his Web site, renames his record label, and launches a new site for it. Playpin Junkyard disappears entirely; U4ic is still listed, with no release date or other information. A new project called Knee Fight is scheduled for September 2005. (Knee Fight — what the ...? As if Playpin Junkyard weren't a stupid enough name...)

Autumn 2005: Release date for Knee Fight comes and goes. Project deleted from site. Link added to the Web site for "Six Steps to Heaven," a Hawaii-based band. U4ic still listed, with new graphic but no information. "Six Steps to Heaven" may have the best shot at actually finishing a project and getting it released, because (a) they're a pre-existing band not manufactured or managed by Q.; (b) they're in Hawaii, so he can't interfere with their operations on a daily basis. We shall see.

October 2005: Q. and B. recycle the name "Watercloset," a band B. used to front about 13 years ago. B. is the only original member in the new lineup, but he does obtain the blessing of other original members to use the name. New band photo includes two of the guys who went to Greece with Loudmouth, along with B., and two others I don't recognize. The forthcoming project is to be titled "The Best of Watercloset" — kind of an odd title for a band that did one CD in the early '90s and has been inactive since then. And, as we shall see, every water closet gets flushed before long.

February 2006: Q. assembles another outreach team for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. Details are never made public: no announcements about which bands are going to Italy with which other bands, etc. Perhaps Q. has learned something about making extravagant promises.

March 2006: U4ic link disappears from record-label homepage. So both bands Q. assembled for Athens are history. The "Watercloset" project is reconfigured as a solo project for B. Considering that these changes happened just after the Winter Olympics, it's really tempting to infer that another meltdown occurred in Italy, similar to the one that unfolds in this blog, and that existing material is being repackaged as a B. solo project because Q. can't keep a band together long enough to do anything else. However, you'll never catch me making such inferences. That would amount to idle speculation, which is not my purpose here.

****Do you think I ever heard back from him about this?

7. Are You in This Band Too?

2006-02-10T17:51:00.000-08:00

I'll show you how to observe a strange event.
Your lord sends now for money.
——Timon of Athens, III.iv

In speech, dear reader, I am not verbose. Articulate, yes, but I'm usually a man of few words.

Print, however, appears to be another story. I'm endeavoring to make this essay fun to read, which is challenging because it's basically one long complaint. I rewrite bits of it to add more punch to the language. I'm endeavoring to make it as accurate as possible; I've changed descriptions and added or deleted things as I rediscover facts I had forgotten. I'm endeavoring to filter out picayune details and unnecessary tangents (well, most of them) in order to focus on the important events — the "bones" of the story, you might say.

And yet this tale is coming out longer than I expected. Perhaps my story is a fish: it has many small bones, all pointing in the same direction.

For eating purposes, I like fish in general, although I like some kinds more than others. One thing about fish, though: You would never take a few bites of catfish and then expect the remaining bites to taste like salmon. But as I review the events that led up to my Greece trip, hindsight tells me that's exactly what I was doing. Q. and E. were serving catfish, even if they claimed it was salmon, and the joke was on me if I really expected it to taste different once I got on the plane.

Speaking of which, the purpose of this chapter is to bring you a few steps closer to that event. Ready? Then let's get on with it.

There were, as I have suggested, a few more recording sessions, mostly at a studio in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood run by a talented engineer named Scott. At one of these sessions I first met Logan, the infant son of Holly, our lead singer (you'll recall that she was pregnant when I met her). More later about him. These sessions were all fairly uneventful (well, OK, I was rear-ended by a pickup on the way to one of them, but fortunately I was driving a rental car and had purchased an insurance waiver). As the months went by I received a lot of CDs from Q. that were meant to represent the progress being made on the Loudmouth record. Frankly, I didn't listen to most of them, but when I did, only a few songs ever sounded as though they'd gotten beyond the rough-mix stage. The others seemed to be subject to a lot of addition and subtraction of tracks, without getting closer to sounding finished.

I chalked this up to the fact that we'd rehearsed only twice in a year. If we'd taken time to establish our arrangements, then we'd have known what tracks needed to be on the CD. But instead we were arranging them as we went, one player at a time, while the studio clock was ticking. Really talented producers can make great music this way, provided that they know what they want and how to get it out of their musicians. But in place of a talented producer we had Q., whose lack of musical acumen I have already complained about, and whose concept of our sound seemed to be a moving target. On 3/18/2004, E. wrote:

Since we are not going to be using three finished tracks that have been done up (because [Q.] is wanting to re-do them), distributors have OK’d a pre-promo mini CD, limited run (meaning not many free copies) with some of these songs.

Ah, so that's why the songs never sounded finished — the ones that were finished had to be redone for some reason. Meanwhile, we had a bunch of musicians from all over Washington state who needed some time to get comfortable playing with each other, especially if we were going to play at the Olympics in front of thousands of people (let alone record a CD). I didn't mind being in a manufactured band as long as we had time to become a band. It doesn't happen overnight.

I thought that since I was the new kid in the band, perhaps only I felt this way. Later I learned otherwise: Holly had expressed the same concern to Q., who allegedly told her that our first five days in Athens would be exclusively devoted to practice. More later about that.

In early July 2004, just six weeks before our trip, some good things began to happen, but so did some weird things. The weirdest was an e-mail from E., claiming that there was some kind of quota on non–European Union performers in Athens, so we'd have to trim the size of the group in order to play at the commercial venues sponsored by Virgin Megastore. The e-mail was being sent to a "select few" band members, and those of us who wanted to "opt out" would be first in line for future outreaches in Hawaii and New Zealand.

Well, if you start "opting out" people, pretty soon you no longer have a band. Sure, they could perform without me and my "color instruments" — and in fact, the band had played a gig in California over the Valentine's Day 2004 weekend, which I wasn't able to make because I had a wedding gig booked. But apart from me, wasn't everyone else pretty essential? A band isn't a modular unit that can be reconfigured any which way, is it?

Well, is it?

More later about that. I'll tell you now, though, that when I got to Greece and asked some of the other band members about that e-mail, none of them remembered getting it. So just how few was a "select few"?

Anyway, the implication seemed to be that I might be able to go to Greece, but I might not be able to bring my wife, Sarah, to do her on-camera coaching. So here's part of an e-mail I sent to E. in response:

Look, I certainly don't want to cause you guys any trouble. I would be disappointed not to go to Greece, but mostly for selfish reasons. If you have room for me and not Sarah, she and I will see what we can do about finding a ticket for her on our own. She can go as a tourist and stay with a missionary friend of hers in Athens. In the end, though, you should do whatever's in the best interest of your goals for outreach & ministry.

I meant it, too. It's a funny thing, though: A couple of weeks after sending that e-mail, I got a voice mail back from E., saying that Sarah and I could both go. But she also asked us to pay for our airfare! Wait a minute, I replied, I thought our airfare was covered. She came back with this:

whoops, I made a mistake and I apologize, your ticket is totally covered. I guess you didn't get back to us in time whether Sarah could help with video production stuff over there.

So now I'd have to give her a money order for $1,352 to cover Sarah's airfare. (That's a dollar for every guitar picker in Nashville.)

You'll recall that I had confirmed Sarah's availability just a few days after Q. originally offered to cover her airfare. Now I was suddenly being told this wasn't soon enough, and I was being asked to cough up some serious cash or leave behind my wife — who had already scheduled the summer classes she teaches around this Greece trip, and whose expectations were just as high as mine. I asked E. whether I could sell my solo CD at our concerts, to help defray the unexpected cost. She said I could, except at churches and a particular gig being organized by Logos Music, which was to be the band's distributor in Greece. So I went to the bank and got the money order, paying for it with some of the revenue from those summer classes.

Now, if I were a cynic I would make a comment about the timing of E.'s sudden demand for $1,352, coming as it did a few days after my offer to find a way for Sarah to travel separately if it would help the band beat the quota system. If I were a cynic I would say it was awfully interesting that although the quota was no longer a problem, suddenly the money was — just after I'd sent an e-mail suggesting that I might have the means and the will to get my wife to Athens on my own. But I am trying hard not to be a cynic.

Still, dear reader, money is money. You might want to keep a running total of my expenses as you read. Just don't tell me what it is — I don't want to get depressed!

Speaking of not being depressed, I did mention that some good things had begun to happen. Namely, another rehearsal was finally scheduled, and we were to play a gig at Seattle's City Church before going to Athens. The rehearsal—our third, and almost exactly a year after our first one — took place at Holly's church in West Seattle. And it was a good one — we actually, finally, started to talk about arrangements. Even though this just consisted of deciding which instrument should be "on top" (i.e., playing fills and lead breaks) for each song, at least we were making those decisions.

One challenge at this rehearsal: The only people in the room I recognized were B., Holly, and Q. The rest of the band was new to me. As follows:

A new bass player, Ben Paris.
The cellist (I don't recall her name).
A keyboardist named Justin, who had played with the band before, but whom I hadn't met.
A new third rhythm guitarist/vocalist named Brian.
A new percussionist.
And last but not least, the drummer. I can't tell you for sure whether this was the same guy from the other rehearsals. There might have been a different drummer every time we rehearsed, for all I know — a real-life Spinal Tap situation.

So we were now a 9-member band. So much for quotas! At the end of the rehearsal I still didn't feel quite ready for our gig (for example, many of us were still playing from chord charts, some of which were still in the wrong key), but I was looking forward to it nonetheless. It felt as though we were finally starting to cook that fish. Or at least reel it in.

8. Come Blow Your Nose

2006-02-10T17:50:00.000-08:00

O earth, I will befriend thee more with rain,
That shall distil from these two ancient urns,
Than youthful April shall with all his showers:
In summer's drought I'll drop upon thee still;
In winter with warm tears I'll melt the snow
And keep eternal spring-time on thy face.
——Titus Andronicus, III.i

You can tell a lot about a church by where they put the tissue boxes.

The Seattle congregation of City Church meets in a former union hall in the Belltown district. I was the first band member to arrive for our evening concert, because I had three instruments to set up and it always takes me longer than anyone else. Not even Q. was there yet. As I was bringing in my gear I observed the church's ushers, all young men dressed identically in khakis and blue polo shirts with the church's logo, preparing for the service. They polished the handrails on the steps leading into the lobby, cleaned the windows, set up displays—and put a tissue box under the first chair in every other row on either side of the center aisle.

I must say that God often moves me to tears and I'm not ashamed of that. However, when I see the tissue boxes coming out, I know I'm going to be expected to weep during the service. And to me there's a difference between being emotionally available to God, on one hand, and being emotionally manipulated by people, on the other. It smacks of Tammy Faye Bakker and Jan Crouch and every other smarmy televangelist you can name. But if that's your thing, I won't try to talk you out of it.

It was on this night that Sarah and I met Ken and Barbie, the final two individuals in this tale who'll need pseudonyms. They're a married couple, and when Q. introduced them to me, I got the impression that Ken was on staff at City Church—which apparently wasn't true. In my never-ending quest to give Q. the benefit of the doubt, I'll say I'm not sure whom to blame for the misunderstanding. Research reveals that Ken formerly led a cell group at City Church for young professional creative artists, but it's not a staff position. The rest of the band showed up, including a drummer (I have no idea if it was the same guy from the previous rehearsal), and we played our gig. Frankly, it was pretty sloppy and tentative, as you might expect of a band that's rehearsed just once in eleven months. Sarah, who isn't one to mince words, later said that we sucked.

But if so, she was the only one outside the band who seemed to notice. Everyone else said it was great. I should mention that the concert was bookended by a couple of loud, interminable "charismatic" prayer sessions featuring lots of glossolalia, and at some point Q. delivered a tearful, rambling monologue in which he sounded a lot less confident and prepared than you might expect of someone who's about to lead a touring band overseas for two and a half weeks. I suppose he was glad for the tissue boxes. I personally didn't need one; I was bemused but not moved. Everything and everybody was prayed for, not just the band and the people we'd be "ministering" to in Athens. I remember a woman praying for someone's patella to be healed, although it was obvious from her prayer that she didn't know what a patella was.

There's something to be said for diversity of worship styles within the church. I don't pretend the style of worship at my church is for everybody, and I would hope that other Christians can extend me the same courtesy regarding their worship styles. I was uncomfortable at City Church, but that alone doesn't mean there's anything wrong with City Church. Nor does it mean there's anything wrong with me. I'm a live-and-let-live kind of guy on such matters.

So I'm not about to suggest that overtly emotional worship and prayer can't be authentic. But some situations call for prayer and others call for action, and in the latter situations prayer is not an appropriate substitute. More later about that.

At dinner after the concert, we learned that Barbie had been a nanny for the children of TV actor John Schneider of "The Dukes of Hazzard," and that Q. greatly admired her and Ken for the purported effectiveness of their prayers as well as for their good looks (he actually called them Ken and Barbie, which he apparently meant as a compliment). More importantly, we learned that they were to accompany us to Athens as co-leaders of the group, although they weren't in the band.

Though it was kind of a strange evening, and I had misgivings afterward about what I was getting into (were Sarah and I going to be the only non-charismatics on the trip?), the concert was useful in helping me make some final decisions about the gear I was going to take to Greece.

When I first got involved with Loudmouth Worshippers, I thought we were going to be an all-out rock band and I'd probably need to use my electric violin and mandolin in order to be heard. The violin needed some repair, so I sent it back to the builder for a $350 pickup upgrade. I paid another $100 for a wireless in-ear monitor so I'd be able to hear myself playing it. (There's no "under-the-ear" sound with a solidbody electric violin, which is hard to get used to if you've played acoustic all your life.) A carbon-fiber bow designed for electric playing set me back another $300. Later it became apparent that we were more of an acoustic pop band, and furthermore, we might be playing some gigs where it wasn't convenient to plug in. So I settled on three acoustic instruments: mandolin, violin, and resophonic tenor guitar, all of which I played at the City Church concert. However, my tenor guitar couldn't be heard at that concert, despite being a loud instrument on a very hot microphone. So afterward I had a pickup custom-made for it, which cost $130, and then paid another $70 to have it installed. In November and December 2003 I spent $59.38 on new instrument cables, and just before we flew out I ordered a pair of Ritter gig bags for $55.75, since (a) my mandolin case has no carrying strap and (b) my tenor guitar case is much too big to carry on a plane. If you're keeping track, that's $1,065.13 in instrument upgrades as a direct result of joining the band.

Naturally I still get the full benefit of those upgrades, and might have spent some of that money even if I had never joined. On the other hand, I might not have. I am not seeking pity, just reporting the facts. And I don't need a tissue box.

9. We Don't Need No Stinking Badges

2006-02-10T17:49:00.000-08:00

I do not without danger walk these streets.
——Twelfth Night, III.iii

Thanks, dear reader, for sticking with me thus far. We'll board the plane after I ponder a couple of e-mails from E.

In the first, she asked for digital photos of me and Sarah for security badges. I cheerfully obliged. I like badges and backstage passes, and I think I still have the last one I was issued—from a gig at a coffeehouse in Walker, Minnesota, where the pass was fun to have but definitely not necessary.

At the Olympics, however, I figured a badge would be essential equipment. Everyone was concerned about security. E. had also asked us for next-of-kin contact information, in case anything went wrong. News media were speculating about a repeat of the 1972 terrorist incident in Munich. Already in 2004, a Greek terrorist group had detonated a bomb in front of an Athens police station 100 days before the opening ceremonies (although these terrorists politely notified local newspapers first). Despite the promise of tight security, several friends warned me to stay home. Athens, they said, would be too dangerous.

But I was determined not to let fear rule my decisions. I figured, out of millions of people in the city, why would terrorists come after me? I sent up a few prayers to God for protection, and took comfort in the promise of security badges.

No doubt some eminent psychologist has written a dissertation on people who fear improbable, remote dangers while overlooking the clear and present dangers that lie right in their path. If not, it'd be a good idea. A title like The Triskaidekaphobic Snowboarder might sell a million copies. Or try something simpler: The Athens Syndrome.

My fears about terrorism, you see, proved groundless. The kindest person I met in Athens was an Iraqi. The real danger came not from terrorists but from some of the people I traveled with. And no security badge was going to protect me from them.

Still, a badge might have come in handy if there had been anything like real, bona fide security at our performances. But there wasn't. Hence no need for the badges. Which might explain why we never got them.

E.'s next e-mail was mostly travel advice, some of it rather naive-sounding—especially the claim that any guitar case up to 45 inches long could be treated as carry-on baggage. From experience, I knew this wasn't true unless the CEO of Northwest Airlines had personally intervened. I didn't worry, though, because I had already ordered my gig bags. I've never had trouble carrying my instruments on a plane, but they're a lot shorter than 45 inches. I figured the guitarists in the band would know that E. was blowing smoke—so they'd bring some kind of flight case and leave any unnecessary guitars at home, right?

Wrong.

We met at SeaTac airport Wednesday morning, August 18, 2004, at 6 a.m. It was three days after one of the biggest holidays in Greece: the Feast of the Dormition, known to Roman Catholics as the Feast of the Assumption. Before the trip was over I would have to feast on a lot of assumptions, both mine and other people's. But I digress.

Loudmouth's three vocalists had brought guitars. So had Desiree, one of the vocalists from U4ic, and so, for some unfathomable reason, had Ken, who wasn't even traveling as a musician. We had five guitars and a bass—all in ordinary cases, and all with owners expecting to carry them on. The gentleman at the ticket counter insisted that all instruments be gathered in one spot to be tagged and checked as baggage. And he turned rather surly when E. yelled at him.

The guitars (except Ken's, which someone took home) were checked, and survived the trip, although some of the cases got pretty well chewed up. The surly gentleman agreed that my gig bags wouldn't protect my instruments in the cargo hold. He grudgingly let me carry them on. If he hadn't, I'd have gone home, and I wouldn't be writing this.

I mentioned Desiree, one of the U4ic vocalists. She was 18. The second vocalist was Hannah, 14, and Barbie was the third vocalist. Sarah and I talked to them and learned that

Hannah and Desiree had not recorded for U4ic, and they had never met before coming to the airport.
U4ic had no other members. They would perform in Athens with members of Loudmouth backing them up.

So I had recorded tracks for a band that didn't exist except as a studio project. And not only had Loudmouth not sufficiently rehearsed its own material, we'd now have to learn another set to back up U4ic on whatever they were singing. (As I've mentioned, U4ic was later renamed "Playpin Junkyard" and then apparently abandoned altogether; Loudmouth was renamed U4ic and then disappeared from Q.'s Web site immediately following the 2006 Winter Olympics. Of course, when a band doesn't really exist, you can call it whatever you want.)

I also learned that Holly was bringing along Logan, her 7-month-old son. Apparently Q. had offered to provide childcare and a crib for him. And no one would break a promise to a mother and her baby, would he?

I don't want to shock you, gentle reader, but once again we had a new drummer. I hadn't seen him at the gig or any of the rehearsals. His name was Ben Dally, he had a graduate degree in psychology, and he was moving from Chicago to Tacoma. I barely had time to digest this news before we left for our gate to board the plane. Our new drummer was on a later flight. The cellist and percussionist were not traveling with us; Justin, the keyboardist, would arrive in Athens after a week or so. For the moment we were down to six members.

E. gave everyone a booklet which contained names and descriptions of our Greek sponsors, lyrics and chords for several worship songs, and the closest thing to a concert itinerary we would receive for the trip. It wasn't much of an itinerary—the dates were in one part of the booklet; the venues were in another part; there were no times or addresses. And, E. told us, we should disregard the concert information in the booklet, because all of it was subject to change. I suppose that if I hadn't been so preoccupied with protecting my instruments and meeting new people, I might have taken the time to be shocked at the revelation that our itinerary wasn't nailed down. But at the time, the booklet went into my backpack and E.'s words went over my head.

Of our flight itself, little need be said. We flew to Athens by way of Detroit and Amsterdam, met Q. at the airport, and traveled by bus to the Ethniki Amyna station, by Metro train to Thissio Square, and on foot to our headquarters, Athens Christian Center. It was now early evening on Thursday, August 19.

Here endeth the preamble to my tale. Up to this point I'd kept any misgivings to myself and done nothing to oppose Q., nor anything I could possibly be ashamed of. From here on out, things get a little more complicated.

10. Me and My Shadow

2006-02-10T17:48:00.000-08:00

He is as disproportion'd in his manners
As in his shape.
——The Tempest, V.i

The Acropolis is the most famous hill in Athens, though not the highest (that'd be Lykavittos) or the one with the best view (that'd be the Areopagos, in my opinion). Home to renowned works of classical architecture such as the Parthenon, the Erechthion, and the temple of Athena Nike, the Acropolis has come to symbolize its home city.

And very early in the morning, as the eastern sun starts to peep over the horizon, the Acropolis casts a long shadow westward across Athens. And perhaps during certain hours of the day in certain months of the year, when the earth is angled toward the sun just so, that shadow might travel about a mile north-northwest and land on the small, unassuming building at 59 Leonidou St. that houses Athens Christian Center.

So I can't say for sure that we weren't staying "in the shadow of the Acropolis." But I don't think you'd be happy if you booked a hotel that was described to you in those terms and then found out it was a mile away. You sure as heck can't see the Acropolis from Leonidou Street.

Nevertheless, it's an easy walk. (This map shows the driving directions, but the walk is much shorter.) We walked and/or took buses or the newly expanded Metro system to and from almost all of our gigs in Athens. And we enjoyed the exercise — it's a very walkable city. This was one area where Q. and E. didn't mislead us: they had instructed everyone to bring comfortable walking shoes. And considering the way people drive in Athens, we were probably a lot safer on foot.

Furthermore, apart from its purported proximity to the Acropolis, we weren't misled about Athens Christian Center. It actually made an ideal base of operations: close enough to central Athens for our purposes, but out-of-the-way enough to be relatively quiet and more or less secure. Q. had warned me that our accommodations would be modest, and this also proved true: it was a simple cinderblock building with a large cement courtyard. Inside were a sanctuary, a couple of offices, a few classrooms, toilets, showers (Q. had paid to have the showers built), and an upstairs recreational room. We slept on air mattresses anywhere there was enough flat space to put them down, indoors or out.

We arrived in Athens minus four suitcases (mine, Sarah's, Hannah's, and Desiree's). Somewhere along a line of communication from the airline to the courier to Haris (the youth pastor at Athens Christian Center) to Q., the impression was formed that because of the Olympics, trucks weren't allowed on Athens' streets after 5 a.m. — so we should expect the courier to arrive with the suitcases in the middle of the night. I volunteered to sleep by the courtyard gate that first night and let the courier in. It was quite warm outside but too noisy to sleep, and naturally the courier didn't show up until 8 a.m. or so — no restrictions on truck traffic being in evidence. It's tempting to blame the whole misunderstanding on Q., but that would be assuming things I don't know for certain. It would, however, be congruent with the other examples I intend to offer.

Prior to my attempt to sleep in the courtyard, Q. invited me to accompany him on a midnight stroll to the Internet café he'd been using. He'd been staying in Athens several days and already knew his way around quite well. This would be the first and last time Q. and I went anywhere together in Athens by ourselves.

If Q. reminds me of anyone, it's documentary filmmaker Michael Moore. They have roughly the same build and fashion sense, and similar speech patterns. They have the same thin veneer of ingratiating, boyish charm masking a deep layer of aggression that can erupt into hostility in a second. They both have an extraordinary talent for mixing a few facts along with a lot of half-truths and insinuations into a potent stew that can seem very persuasive until you examine it carefully. On politics, however, they probably differ significantly — although I can't say I know exactly what Q.'s politics are, other than that he professed not to have any.

On the way to the Internet café, we passed through Omonoia Square, which is on a major traffic hub at the north end of central Athens. A huge stage, one of many official Olympic venues in the city, dominated the square. "We had Feveri$h here the other night," said Q., "and the whole place was packed."

So Feveri$h — one of the groups I thought Loudmouth would be sharing venues with, hanging out with, or at least getting to see — had played its gig before we even got there, and then moved on. (The same, I later learned, was true of Jimmy & the Pullet Pluckers.) But at least the venue was there, and it looked like a great place to play. And if Q. could get Feveri$h booked in that venue — which is what I thought he meant by "We had Feveri$h here the other night" — he could book us there, right?

It depends on what your definition of the word "we" is. More later about that.

At the time it didn't occur to me to be disappointed. We soon reached the Internet café, and I have to hand it to Q. — that really was the best Internet café in town, at least of the ones I tried. There we happened to meet an interesting character: Marc Price, better known to just about everyone as Skippy on the NBC show "Family Ties." Marc was in Athens with an NBC camera crew doing feature stories from the Olympics. Q. introduced me to him as a talented American bouzouki player, and Marc seemed intrigued. NBC might want to do a segment about me, he said. Q. gave him a phone number.

Slight problem there: I had told Q. and E. which instruments I was bringing to Athens, and my bouzouki was not among them. I did not wish to embarrass Q. by pointing this out in front of Marc, so I just kept my mouth shut. I knew he was trying to hype my abilities as much as possible in hopes of getting NBC to cover our band, and I have to admit it was flattering to hear him sing my praises. But I knew he had no idea what he was talking about.

What I didn't yet realize was just how often Q. used this kind of hype and half-truth to make things seem bigger and more impressive than they actually were. But I was about to find out.

11. Cast of Characters

2006-02-10T17:47:00.000-08:00

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
——As You Like It, II.vii

At this point in my journey I met a lot of new people who will figure in my story. So I'll just introduce them all at once instead of doing it as I go along.

Youth in Action
The other tenants at Athens Christian Center were Youth in Action, a group of high school kids from San Diego, along with their adult sponsors, who had come to Athens to do street-mime ministry. Sponsored by an organization called Action Ministry, they had no connection with our bands other than staying at the same place. Reportedly these kids got a lot of grief from the Greeks: the police and security guards often shut down their performances, and audiences threw cigarette butts and beer cans at them.

Haris
I've already mentioned Haris, the youth minister at Athens Christian Center. He was in charge of the place, because Stavros, the senior pastor, was on vacation. But when he was around, he was in the office taking care of church business. He had no time to look after us. So Q. apparently decided that he would supervise everyone staying there, including Youth in Action. Which, I guess, didn't sit too well with their adult leaders.

Qedem
A (now-defunct) female Christian hard-rock trio from Michigan: Rebekah, Rhonda, and Tracy (and Tracy's husband, Jon, who was serving as their road manager). Tracy had a connection with Greeks for Christ International, a U.S.-based evangelical ministry that was also supporting Q.'s Olympic outreach. Through this connection Qedem had gotten hooked up with Q., who had offered to book them some concerts. They didn't stay regularly at Athens Christian Center, but they played a lot of events with us.

Qedem got shafted even more egregiously than Loudmouth did:

When rock bands travel by plane—unless they have a tremendous equipment budget—they routinely rely on the promoter to provide "backline": guitar amps, drums, and other equipment too cumbersome or sensitive to check in an airplane's luggage hold. Seems no one thought to obtain any backline for Qedem, so they arrived in Greece with no amps. Ergo, they had no way to produce the distorted electric guitar sounds that are the backbone of their music. Rhonda eventually bought a distortion pedal to put between her guitar and the sound board, but not before the girls got stuck playing a few acoustic sets. They did so cheerfully, but their music wasn't well served that way. (More later about backline.) Qedem wrote a relentlessly positive online journal about their Athens experience, but even so, they couldn't help including this line:
There have been complications with what "we have all you need for your shows" really means.
There's understatement for you.
Sarah talked to the Qedem girls more than I did. They told her they'd ended up paying about $9,000 out of their own pockets for their travel expenses (at $2,250 per person, that's a good chunk more than the $1,352 I paid for Sarah), because Q. and E. allegedly* changed their itinerary after booking their tickets, and then required them to pay the airline's fees for the change.

Christian
One of our volunteer roadies recruited through Q.'s Web site. Christian is a free-spirited world traveler, and coming to Greece was not the least bit of a stretch for him. (I think he was already in Europe anyway—he went to Italy and then to Poland after the Olympics.) He was, however, a bit surprised to find himself serving as our sound tech, which allegedly happened because he was the only volunteer with experience running a board. He did an admirable job, especially given that it was a responsibility he never expected to have.

There's always the possibility that I misunderstood Christian, but the way he explained the process made me wonder: Had Q. really left it up to chance that he would get a volunteer with sound-tech skills? If so, then what if there had been no such volunteer?

Gilbert
Our other volunteer roadie. What a guy. Gilbert was from L.A. He had been in a bad car accident and had a disability that made it hard for him to walk. Despite which, he never complained, and merely wanted to be treated like everyone else.

Which is why my blood still boils at something he told me: Before the bands arrived, Q. sent Gilbert and Christian around Athens to the various Olympic concert venues to try to obtain bookings. (Mind you, these were the venues Q. had professed to already have booked.) Naturally, all the venues were full. The Olympics had already started. But Q. instructed Gilbert and Christian to offer our bands as last-minute replacements if anyone canceled. And he allegedly told Gilbert to do "whatever it takes" to get bookings—including trying to use his disability to engender sympathy.

In his book Surgery Speaks to China, medical missionary Paul Adolph describes a mendicant Chinese boy whom he was treating for an ulcer on the leg. (This would have been in the 1940s or thereabouts.) It seems that the ulcer was the boy's meal ticket, so once it started to heal, he left the clinic. Adolph later saw him back on the street, "proudly displaying his ulcer and asking for alms." If you've been to Asia or Europe, you've probably seen people doing that with one disability or another. (Heck, you may have seen it in the United States—I can think of some disabled panhandlers in Seattle—but some of the ones in Europe tend to be more aggressive about it.) So, dear reader, you will understand that according to Gilbert, Q. had essentially instructed him to behave like a beggar—asking for concert bookings instead of money. Gilbert refused.**

As far as I've been able to determine, Q.'s request doesn't actually violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. It's just monumentally insensitive. I wasn't there to witness this, but I'll tell you what I did witness. Gilbert's other job was gatekeeper: he hung out in the courtyard at Athens Christian Center and let people in and out of the locked gate all day. (Haris had given Q. two keys; Q. kept one and gave the other to Gilbert.) This meant Gilbert slept in the courtyard every night. One night, well after midnight, with my own eyes, I saw Q. enter the courtyard and wake a sleeping Gilbert by yelling at him and kicking his air mattress. He didn't seem to have anything urgent to tell Gilbert—just felt like waking him up, I guess.

Cory and the Russians
These folks were part of our team, but I think they were also with another organization, although I'm not sure which one. They were an impressive bunch. Cory, the leader, was a South African man in his late 30s. The other 4 or 5 team members were teenagers from former Soviet countries: Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan—and one was from Germany. They did a lot of heavy-duty evangelical street witnessing and counseling, helped out as roadies, and did chores no one else seemed inclined to do, like cleaning the toilets and scrubbing the floors at Athens Christian Center.

The King's Kids
There were two King's Kids teams in Athens: one from France and another from Germany. They didn't stay with us, but often performed with us. Some of these kids were as young as 12; they were doing mime and interpretive dance, similar to what Youth in Action did (but without the greasepaint). I have to say that in terms of being well rehearsed and having compelling material, both King's Kids and Youth in Action kicked Loudmouth's butt. I don't know if you've ever been shown up by a bunch of French preteens, but it's kind of a humbling experience.

Elias, Philemon, and Eva
Elias is a Greek evangelist. Out of a basement ministry center in downtown Athens, he runs Passage to Life, an outreach to prostitutes, drug addicts, and anyone who needs the Gospel. Elias doesn't speak a whole lot of English, so much of our contact with him was through his son, Philemon. His daughter, Eva, also interpreted for him. Elias turned out to be our major concert sponsor in Athens; most of the events we played were outreaches at which he preached.

There's a law against proselytization (Law No. 1363/38, Section 4, to be exact) in Greece, where the Orthodox Church enjoys a near-monopoly on religious expression. The law violates Article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights, but nonetheless it's still on the books, as far as I know. Another law requires all Greek houses of worship—of any stripe—to be licensed by the local Orthodox bishop.***

I don't know exactly how Elias worked around these laws. Perhaps, knowing the world's eyes were on them, the Greeks eased up on enforcement during the Olympics (except, apparently, where Youth in Action was concerned). At any rate, Elias made the most of the opportunity, with at least seven outreach events at various venues in a little more than a week. And he got exciting results, with lots of New Testaments being handed out and dozens of people making decisions for Christ.

Elias devoted significant resources to these events: he rented or provided equipment, got the event permits, and even made T-shirts for everyone. Q. enthusiastically supported Elias and put all of our bands—Loudmouth, U4ic, and Qedem—at his disposal. Which wasn't a problem, except when it was a problem.

Michalis
Michalis is the director of Logos Music, which as far as I know is Greece's only distributor of CCM recordings. (It's part of Tennessee-based AMG International.) He's also a worship leader at an evangelical church in the north end of Athens. Michalis was our other major Greek sponsor, and set up four concerts for us. The booklets E. gave us at the airport described Michalis as having a "genuine heart towards ministry." By the end of our trip Q. was talking about Michalis in very different terms. More later about that.

Pandora
Pandora has had an interesting life, and she'll be glad to tell you about it. I think she said she dated Carlos Santana's manager in the 1970s, but later converted to Christianity and has spent much of her time since then serving in various capacities with missionary and evangelistic organizations. Q. had hired her as a cook to prepare the meals that were supposed to be part of our accommodations. Slight problem there: Athens Christian Center had no kitchen facilities other than an electric hot-water pot, a coffee maker, and a single family-size refrigerator. Including the Youth in Action team, there were at least 30 people staying there. Ever tried feeding 30 people when you don't have a kitchen? More later about that.

Russ and Sandy Rosen
Russ and Sandy are based in Fort Langley, British Columbia, and work for Youth with a Mission. Russ has a blues/pop/rock band (the Russ Rosen Band, naturally), and Sandy leads a dance team called Raw Motion (the best evangelistic dance team we saw in Athens). They're nice folks, and we ran into them at several different concert venues.

Other assorted people came and went. A volunteer named Jeff flew over from Korea and stayed a few days. A guy from Spain showed up with his Greek buddy. I wasn't always clear on who people were or how they found us, because I wasn't tapped into the grapevine connecting all the mission groups in Athens. Pandora was, and Q. was to an extent (although he perhaps should have been more tapped in—more later about that).

Anyhow, I think I've introduced the major characters.

*Sorry, gotta use the world "allegedly" for anything I don't have direct knowledge about. I am not making my sources out to be liars, just covering my rear end.

**Here's an relevant excerpt from chapter 22 of Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper. In this case the ulcer's fake but the alms are real:

The morning after that combat, Hugo got up with a heart filled with vengeful purposes against the king. He had two plans in particular. One was to inflict upon the lad what would be, to his proud spirit and 'imagined' royalty, a peculiar humiliation; and if he failed to accomplish this, his other plan was to put a crime of some kind upon the king and then betray him into the implacable clutches of the law.

In pursuance of the first plan, he proposed to put a 'clime' upon the king's leg, rightly judging that that would mortify him to the last and perfect degree; and as soon as the clime should operate, he meant to get Canty's help, and force the king to expose his leg in the highway and beg for alms. 'Clime' was the cant term for a sore, artificially created. To make a clime, the operator made a paste or poultice of unslaked lime, soap, and the rust of old iron, and spread it upon a piece of leather, which was then bound tightly upon the leg. This would presently fret off the skin, and make the flesh raw and angry-looking; blood was then rubbed upon the limb, which, being fully dried, took on a dark and repulsive color. Then a bandage of soiled rags was put on in a cleverly careless way which would allow the hideous ulcer to be seen and move the compassion of the passer-by.

***Do you think Q. told us about these laws?

12. That's Not Happening

2006-02-10T17:46:00.000-08:00

Fit to govern? No, not to live.
——Macbeth, IV.iii

Today’s chapter of my travelogue opens on the morning of Friday, August 20. After breakfast and a brief meeting with Q. and E., Loudmouth Worshippers ventured into the sanctuary of Athens Christian Center for our first practice session in Greece. Three problems (at least from my point of view) kept it from being a good practice:

I’ve mentioned my Rane preamps, which I had mounted in a rack with a Rane mixer. I had brought plug adapters for them, and I plugged them into a power strip on the platform while I was setting up. Well, I shouldn’t have done that. Electric current in Greece runs at 220 volts; my gear was designed for U.S. current, which is 110 volts. In a matter of seconds, the power supplies for all three of my rack components were fried. At the time I thought the components themselves might be harmed; I didn't know that the power supply is designed to prevent that from happening. So fortunately, my preamps and mixer weren't damaged, only rendered unusable. When I got back to the States it cost about $80 to replace the damaged power supplies. Meanwhile, though, my instruments had suddenly become a lot less pluggable.

Fortunately I also had an old Fishman G series preamp and a direct box, both of which run on 9-volt batteries, as well as an A/B box I could use to switch between two instruments. Running my rig this way required extra cables, and I had to borrow one from the church for a few days until I got a chance to buy one from a music store. It cost about 10 euros, and I also picked up a Y-adapter for 7 euros — which enabled me to run all three instruments into the Fishman without having to unplug anything in the middle of a set. That I had brought the Fishman at all was either dumb luck or divine providence — take your pick.

Q. had observed (or, at least, had seen) me bringing rack gear to three rehearsals and a gig before we came to Greece. Heck, he'd seen me carrying the rack all the way from the Athens airport to the church. In an ideal world, Q., as the one setting up the concerts, would take responsibility to provide voltage transformers if band members needed them. (That’s the way Continentals did it.) But, of course, this isn't an ideal world. A promoter who neglects to provide guitar amps for a hard-rock band isn't likely to bother about getting a transformer for a fiddle player. On the other hand, I could have investigated the voltage question before plugging in, and I didn’t do it — so I can’t assign Q. all the blame. I’d be happy to split it with him, 50-50.
Christian, thrust into the position of sound tech, was trying to figure out a sound board labeled in Greek, and he wasn’t very successful at that first rehearsal. We never did get a good mix. At the time I thought it was all his fault, but as I learned more about the circumstances I became more sympathetic.
I can't pinpoint the exact instant I lost all respect for Q. In fact, it wasn't an instant but more of a gradual process over the first few days in Greece. However, a good deal of respect evaporated at the moment, not long after we started rehearsing, when Q. strode into the sanctuary, pointed at Ben Paris, the bass player, and said, "That’s not happening." He insisted that Ben unplug his bass. I think Ben did rehearse with us that day, albeit unplugged. But Q. forced him to sit out our first few gigs. I never got a satisfactory explanation about why. Ben didn’t want to talk about it, but he had evidently done something that offended Q. In a few days’ time I would learn just what one had to do to offend Q. so greatly that he would suspend one from a band. (Here’s a hint: It’s not hard. You could probably do it too, with tools you have around the house.)

There might well be a need for some kind of discipline on a missionary/outreach trip such as ours. Suspending Ben, however, was a rotten way to discipline him, because it punished not only Ben but the whole band. Our rehearsal suffered because we didn’t sound right, and our gigs suffered because our rehearsal had been inadequate. My trust in B. was undermined because B. obviously knew what was going on, but wouldn't talk about it except to defend Q. And the band’s confidence in Q. took a nosedive, because Q. was behaving like an unreasonable, autocratic despot, not to mention a jerk. As if suspending Ben weren’t enough, he found other ways to disrupt our rehearsal, yanking out individual band members for private conversations whenever he felt like it. Most musicians would agree that rehearsals go better when they're not riddled with interruptions, but that seems to be a difficult concept for some non-musicians to grasp.

So between technical problems and vanishing personnel, we didn't accomplish a whole lot. Before we knew it, we had to cut off our rehearsal and get ready for the evening's multilingual worship service. Which, I must admit, was pretty neat. The French and German King's Kids were there, along with the Youth in Action team, Cory and the Russians, plus Elias and some of his associates. We all sang together in four or five different languages, and whatever Elias and Q. said was translated into French and German as well as Greek or English. Elias passed out the T-shirts he'd made for everyone (and collected 5 euros a pop for them), and got us all sufficiently fired up about supporting his outreach efforts.

The day had also seen the arrival of Q.'s outreach CDs. He's produced several of these for previous Olympics and other events. The CD was a "various artists" compilation including songs from Jessica Simpson and Moby (both of whom, Q. claimed, had waived their royalties and allowed him to use the songs for free) along with one song each from Loudmouth and U4ic, as well as songs by several other CCM artists, including Switchblade and Bags of Dirt. The U4ic song was the calypso version of "Sweet By and By" with my tenor guitar tracks on it, so it's accurate to say I was on the same CD as Jessica Simpson and Moby. Yippee. As far as I know I didn't have any tracks on "Come Thou Fount," the Loudmouth song. (Both songs are public-domain hymns; thus the question of songwriter royalties was deftly avoided.) Dates, times, and locations for five of our concerts were printed on the CD — namely, four nights in Vathis Square and one night at Cosmovision Center in Koropi. More later about that. Also on the CD was a freeware version of the Bible software that Q.'s company distributes. The idea, apparently, was for our team members to pass out these CDs while the bands were playing, and let the songs and software do the work of getting people to convert to evangelical Christianity.

So after the worship service, off to Thissio Square we went — at Q.'s behest — to try out this concept. I am fairly certain we had no permit or authorization to perform there that night; this was guerrilla/busker-style street evangelism. We had no sound system, and I was still playing several songs off charts because I hadn't memorized them. We sat on a wall and plowed uncertainly through a few songs with acoustic guitars, mandolin, fiddle, and a djembe while Sarah and some other team members handed out CDs to people walking by. This got the attention of security guards in the square, who told them to stop. Sarah and Q. disagreed over what to do next. Q. and E. wanted the team to distribute CDs anyway, but Sarah refused, saying she'd gladly talk to passersby about her faith, but didn't wish to create problems with the security guards. To which E. replied, "It's a free country."

I've mentioned the Greek anti-proselytization law. Here's a little background about recent enforcement of said law. In 1997, at the International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) track and field competition in Athens, Greek police harassed and roughed up volunteers operating a booth for More than Gold, an organization that sponsors outreach at international sporting events. (More than Gold was, of course, also involved at the Olympics, in an outreach called Flame 2004. More later about that.) Also at the IAAF meet, the police shut down a performance by Scarlet Journey, another American Christian band from Seattle. Translation: It's not a free country, and direct defiance of the security guards could well have derailed our whole trip before it really got started.

Fortunately, Q. wised up and moved us a few blocks away to Monastiraki Square, where we set the band up in front of McDonald's, played till our fingers were stiff, and sang ourselves hoarse while CD distribution continued. (Either there were no guards at Monastiraki or they didn't care.) B. in particular started losing his voice, and the more we played the worse we sounded. At one point someone asked me and Sarah whether our band was on the CD she'd just given him. When we said yes, he gave it back.

At this point most of us still were fairly disoriented and probably couldn't have found our way back to Athens Christian Center on our own, so we were at the mercy of Q.'s decisions about where to go and when to leave. I think we quit playing around 11 p.m., long after we'd ceased to sound like anything worth listening to, and dragged ourselves back to the church. There, instead of going to bed like sensible people, we stayed up. I remember having a Coca-Cola craving at midnight and wandering around the neighborhood in search of one. The only place open was a hookah bar, but by golly, they had Coke. Back at the church, most of us shot hoops, or sat around and talked, until 1:30 a.m. or so.

Here now are some observations based on that night's experience. I can't say I realized all of these things on that night, because I'm a slow learner:

Just because my gear is right under a promoter's nose doesn't mean he'll automatically take responsibility for it. I'd have been much better off looking after my own needs rather than assuming that Q. would do it.
Despite all his pretensions about artistic quality, Q. either couldn't tell a bad performance from a good one, didn't care, or was too far away to hear the band.
It was more important to Q. that Sarah hand out CDs than that she talk to people and share her experience as a Christian with them.
If Q. really did promise Holly five days of practice before we played a gig, he either had forgotten or had lied to her. Or maybe both.
Not once, never, before we came to Greece or while we were there, did Q. mention anything to me about the anti-proselytization law. I didn't know for sure that it existed until after I got home. I find it difficult to imagine that no one in Greece told him about it, but that leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that he deliberately chose not to tell us. Now, since I think laws limiting religious freedom are unjust, I might well choose to break them as an act of civil disobedience. But that should be my choice. If I were going to risk harassment, assault, arrest, and/or expulsion from the country, I'd want to know about it before I decided to go.
Q.'s initial pigheaded response to the guards in Thissio Square is merely a further indication of a cavalier disrespect for local authority. Fortunately, we never got in serious trouble in Greece — but if we had, we might have left Elias up a creek without a band. And let's look ahead to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, shall we? I'm betting the cops in the People's Republic of China will be a lot quicker to act than the Greek cops were. Thumb your nose at them, and kiss the rest of your trip goodbye.

It's time now to introduce a feature I'll call "Today's Pearl of Wisdom," for lack of a more accurate term I can use in polite company. Pearls of Wisdom are things I remember Q. saying, but I don't remember exactly when he said them. The phrase "Today's Pearl of Wisdom" doesn't mean I am claiming that I heard Q. say this on Friday, Aug. 20 — only that I did hear him say it sometime, and I'm reporting it today. So...

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: During one of his speeches to us, Q. confessed that he didn't think he possessed leadership skills (a rare example of honest self-evaluation on his part), but his acquaintances kept telling him that he was a leader, and their encouragement was what got him started traveling overseas with his outreach groups (instead of, for example, sending other people with actual, proven leadership skills). I have only one comment, and it's directed toward Q.'s encouraging acquaintances:

Are you smoking crack?

13. At Least There Weren't Any Freedom Fries

2006-02-10T17:45:00.000-08:00

'Tis burnt; and so is all the meat.
What dogs are these! Where is the rascal cook?
——The Taming of the Shrew, IV.i

You might expect, dear reader, that following our unsuccessful practice on Friday, the foremost thing on Q.'s mind would be carving out some more time on Saturday for Loudmouth to get its act together.

Alas, 'twas not to be. We certainly expressed the desire to practice, but Q. had more important things for us to do.

I, for one, was to accompany E. to the Internet café near Omonoia Square, where I'd gone with Q. on Thursday night. And as with Q. and the Thursday trip, this was the first and last time I went anywhere alone with E. in Athens. She had urgent business at the café: she was to check e-mail for some information about buying a light system to use at some of our concerts, print out said information, and return to the church. Other band members would await the information and then go make the transaction.

Naturally, Sarah, who has a master's degree in theatre and knows a thing or two about lighting, offered her assistance, and spent the morning waiting for our return. But then Q. rebuffed her — actual professional knowledge about lights apparently being irrelevant. Instead he told her to help the Youth in Action kids, who were hand-painting several large banners to decorate the stage for our outreach concerts.

I don't mean to suggest that lighting and banners are unimportant. Continentals had them too — I was on the banner crew — but they were never allowed to trump our rehearsal time. Sarah's original intention had been to spend the day sightseeing, but she stuck around only to help with the lighting transaction — which didn't even happen that day, apparently because E. and I didn't get back from the Internet café in time. So her morning was wasted and she was miffed. When she resisted the idea of painting banners (because the kids already had this task well in hand), Q. told her to babysit Holly's son, Logan.

I hadn't realized that my mission with E. was time-sensitive. It certainly hadn't seemed time-sensitive:

There were other, albeit inferior, Internet cafés closer to the church — but it had to be that café, which was a considerable hike.
There was no chance of having the information e-mailed as a text message to Q.'s cell phone, or of E. calling him from Omonoia Square with the information. Why? Because Q. hadn't brought a cell phone to Greece, nor rented one after he got there. More later about that. This wasn't the last headache caused by his refusal to make himself accessible via phone.

The trip did have one positive result — it gave me an excuse to steal a map of Athens Q. had left lying around the courtyard. Between that map and my Athens tourist guide, I finally oriented myself. I wanted to be able to find my way around independently and not have to rely on Q. to take me places.

We managed to squeeze in an hour or two of rehearsal in the courtyard between lunch and the evening's big event, planned by Q. as a bonding experience between the various teams I've mentioned. That big event? A bonfire with hot dogs and S'mores.

Yes, you read that right.

Athens in the summer is hot. I was there for a week before I ever saw a cloud. The last thing anybody wanted was a bonfire, but Q. and Ken built one anyway — right on the concrete in the church courtyard, where it left a huge black scar. During our gathering, no one wanted to sit near the bonfire, because we were already warm enough. We had no wire hangers, sticks, or other apparatus for roasting hot dogs on the bonfire (and the church, you'll recall, had no kitchen), so Pandora boiled the dogs on a stove somewhere blocks away. Then she and Ben Paris lugged them back in a pot.

If you ever have to plan an event designed to bring people from various cultures together for a common purpose, here's a bit of advice: Don't serve hot dogs and S'mores. They're just so ... American. You might recall that "hegemony" was one of the buzzwords of international politics in 2004. Many people from other countries, not entirely without cause, ascribed to the United States the sinister motive of trying to increase its political and cultural influence in the world by any and all means, including the Iraq invasion. Well, I'm here to tell you that American cultural hegemony doesn't always stem from sinister motives. Sometimes it's just ignorance. A Yank may simply fail to consider self-evident truths, such as this one: Most Europeans will find hot dogs disgusting. Especially if they're French kids raised on croissants and paté.

Another problem with serving American food: We weren't in America. Pandora had tried to explain to Q. that hot dogs would be not only inappropriate but hard to locate. He insisted on them anyway. I'm not sure where she finally found hot dogs, but they weren't very good ones, even as hot dogs go. As for the S'mores, two of the essential elements — graham crackers and plain marshmallows — were unavailable in Greece. The substitutes were "digestive biscuit" — a large, round, bland, cardboard-textured cookie you can get all over Europe — and some dodgy-looking marshmallow-like confections filled with strawberry jam, which wouldn't stand up to roasting.

But the chocolate was pretty good.

Since at least the 1980s, and perhaps earlier, most evangelical missionary training has included some discussion of "contextualization." The idea is to learn to separate the content of the message (the Gospel) from its context — the trappings and expectations of Western culture — in the belief that it's necessary and desirable to disseminate the former with minimal interference from the latter. Only then is it possible to contextualize the Gospel for the culture you're working in, rather than the one you came from. Missionaries who are concerned about contextualization might observe local customs regarding dress, diet, and domicile rather than clinging to or exporting Western ways. (I know a lot of people think religion is just another of those Western ways — but if I agreed with that, I would've stayed home.) Consider, if you will, the opening scenes of The African Queen, where Katharine Hepburn and Robert Morley portray missionaries trying to get native Africans to sing Western hymns accompanied by a harmonium. Contextualization might have helped them.

If contextualization meant anything to Q., he might have chosen a cuisine that would put Americans, Russians, Germans, and French on equal footing. Naturally it couldn't be cuisine from any of our native countries. It would have to be some kind of food that was both readily available and equally unfamiliar to all of us, such as ... hm ... let me think ... uh ... wait, don't tell me ...

Oh, I know! How about Greek food?

Our band sang some more worship songs, and the kids did some of their choreography numbers for us — taking extra care not to singe themselves in the bonfire. Having alienated the European kids with the hot dogs, Q. tried to win them back with an encouraging speech — only to prove that his cultural unawareness didn't stop with food. Helene, the French King's Kids leader/translator, had a heck of a time making sense of his slang-laden ramblings. At least once that night, I had to translate what he said into standard English before she could render it in French.

Around midnight, after the fire was extinguished and the King's Kids had left, the guys started shooting some more hoops, so I joined in. In a spectacularly bad midcourt shot, I heaved a basketball completely over the cinder-block wall into some inaccessible corner of the compound. We never did recover it. Then Q., who was playing barefoot, ripped a pretty good hole in his toe by scraping it against the same wall. That's when we learned that none of our four leaders — Q., E., Ken, or Barbie — had thought to bring any medical or first-aid supplies. With as many people as we had, walking everywhere and staying in such modest accommodations, small injuries were almost inevitable — but the only one of us who had realized it was Sarah, who got the medical kit from her suitcase and patched up Q.'s toe.

Having been warned by Q. that tomorrow would be a busy day, we sought an earlier bedtime. Sarah and I were at this juncture sleeping separately, she with the girls and I with the guys. Private rooms were hard to come by in Athens Christian Center.

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: Q. claimed that his friends from Youth with a Mission told him every YWAM mission trip involved at least one fist fight between participants — so naturally he, Q., anticipated conflict within our group and would not be surprised if a fist fight broke out. A couple of observations:

Sarah spent three months on the mission field in Papua New Guinea and another year in France. I spent three months with Continentals and have flown all over the United States playing with another CCM band. Total fist fights witnessed or participated in: 0. We have mutual friends who've spent plenty of time with YWAM groups. They've never mentioned any fist fights.
If Q. expected a fist fight, it's even more unfathomable that he didn't bring a first aid kit.
At times Q. behaved as though he were trying to make his prediction come true. More later about that.

14. Not So Much a Band

2006-02-10T17:44:00.000-08:00

How irksome is this music to my heart!
——Henry VI, Part II, II.i

On Sunday morning, August 22, the members of Loudmouth arose early for our first church gig. It was at St. Andrew's, an English-speaking evangelical congregation that serves mostly diplomats and expatriates. St. Andrew's was the venue where Q. had claimed to have a confirmed booking with Loudmouth, Jimmy & the Pullet Pluckers, and Mob Barley on the following weekend. He even had that concert posted on itickets.com for a while.

St. Andrew's meets in two locations. The early service was in something like a school auditorium on the north end of Athens; the later service was closer to central Athens in a former Lutheran church near the French embassy. Accompanied by E., we carried our gear to Thissio Square and took the Metro all the way to Kifissia, its northern terminus, where some guys from the church met us and drove us to the auditorium.

The first time I lost my temper in Athens was while setting up for that morning's concert. I had just learned from Steve, the pastor, that I couldn't plug in because he had no more cables long enough to reach the input box, which was permanently mounted in a room backstage. "Then I might as well take a walk," I snapped at Steve, and stepped away for a minute so I could cool off.

The problem could have been averted if I'd borrowed a long XLR cable from Athens Christian Center, but of course I hadn't known I would need one. (When we got back I went ahead and borrowed that cable, and kept it for a few days until I had the chance to buy one for myself.) Later I mentioned the incident to Q., who immediately got defensive and claimed that he'd told Steve all about our audio needs. However, given Q.'s general ineptitude with sound and technical issues and his habit of vague communication, I'm inclined to believe that what he had told Steve was neither precise nor accurate.

Eventually we solved the problem by plugging me, along with the guitars, into a keyboard amp that had a couple of extra channels, and I guess we ended up with a decent mix—or if we didn't, no one said anything about it. I apologized to Steve and we played a few songs, which still sounded pretty ragged and amateurish.

While hanging out after that service, I saw my first copy of the Loudmouth demo CD, which Holly had managed to obtain from E. I don't have one myself, and never heard it, but Holly later listened to it and said it sounded pretty much like our last practice CD, bad mixes and all. This embarrassed her, since it hardly represented the best efforts of anyone in the band. But what intrigued me most was the blurb in the liner notes:

Loudmouth is not so much a band, they are more a community of artist [sic] that desire to encourage each other to use their God given talent to its fullest extent and intended purpose.

"Not so much a band" was certainly true. But "community of artist(s)"? For that to be accurate, we'd have to know each other, wouldn't we? How could we be a "community" when half of us had barely met before coming overseas? And there were credits in the liner notes for musicians I'd never met. Bands can be manufactured; communities can't. Furthermore, although "not so much a band" represented how most of us felt about our situation, that's not how we wanted to feel. I know I wanted us to be a band, and was frustrated that we hadn't been allowed the time to become one. Neither did "not so much a band" seem to line up with the festivals-and-radio-airplay marketing plan Q. and E. had presented us. Or were we on the "no exposure until you have a CD to sell" marketing plan now? I forget.

Before the second St. Andrew's service, at the former Lutheran church, the small black bag containing all my cables and other gear turned up missing. It had been left in one of the cars that brought us down from the auditorium, and fortunately it was found before I freaked out. This gig went a little more smoothly, thanks in part to a better sound system, and a couple of our songs seemed to have improved over the morning renditions—an encouraging sign. The rest of our fearless leaders showed up, along with the U4ic girls and Sarah, now in her second day of babysitting duty with Logan. Remember, she came over to be an on-camera coach for TV. Instead she was changing diapers. She had tried to set up a babysitting schedule with Barbie, Hannah, and Desiree, but those parties flaked out of their appointed times almost immediately.

After lunch at a sidewalk café near Thissio Square, we returned to Athens Christian Center, where Q. insisted that everyone take a nap. Sarah and I weren't tired and wanted perhaps to do a little sightseeing, but we couldn't get any coherent information out of Q. about when he might need us to come back. So we sat in the courtyard, played cards, and basically killed time until Q. gave us our marching orders: gather our gear and carry it to Hope Place, the tiny basement outreach center near Omonoia Square operated by Elias. We donned the T-shirts we'd bought from Elias on Friday and packed ourselves into Hope Place along with the German and French kids, where we spent about an hour getting fired up for that evening's outreach event.

This concert took place at Eleftherias Square in Koridallos, a suburb west of Athens. (It ain't on a lot of maps, but it's on this one.) The square is a picturesque spot surrounded by shops and restaurants. We set up right in front of a fountain. Because of the distance, we sent all our instruments and gear over in cars, and took a bus to get there ourselves. When we arrived, my black gear bag was missing again, and I lost my temper again. This time I snapped at one of the German King's Kids who was helping to set up sound. When B. finally located the bag, it had again been left in a car. I resolved (1) to keep the gear bag inside a bigger bag I was using for instrument stands; (2) not to let my stuff out of my sight again.

I wish I could say everything else went fine that night, but the opposite's true. We suffered through the worst, most disorganized sound check I've ever witnessed, followed by an embarrassing introduction from Q. ("Are you ready to PARTY?!?!?!?") that seemed to puzzle the small but curious crowd. He didn't bother to make sure Loudmouth was ready to play before introducing us—I, for one, wasn't finished setting up. It was our sloppiest performance yet, and U4ic's was even sloppier. The choreography teams did their thing, Elias preached between sets, and team members handed out CDs when they weren't performing. And on and on it went, getting uglier and uglier. I guess Elias kept asking Q. for more music, and Q. kept ordering us back onto the stage, ready or not. I think I played four times that night: two Loudmouth sets when we didn't yet have enough solid material for one, plus me trying to play along with U4ic on stuff we hadn't rehearsed at all, plus me, B., and Ben Dally on his djembe in another unrehearsed set—I don't even remember what songs we did. At such events, the music is meant to draw a crowd for the evangelist to preach to, but this night the music was so bad that people left every time we played. The King's Kids did better at attracting spectators.

When we finally got back to Athens Christian Center, it was midnight. We were tired, discouraged, and determined to find more practice time, to prevent future embarrassments. Most of us were also hungry, although it was too late to do much about it. Q. hadn't provided any dinner, and some of us hadn't managed to grab anything for ourselves in Koridallos. I'd been afraid to leave, even for a few minutes, because I never knew when Q. might tell me to play another set. Brian and I were among the lucky few: He'd managed to grab some souvlaki sandwiches and gave me one of them. Holly invited us all to get up early the next day for a band meeting, which struck me as the best idea I'd heard all day.

Since Youth in Action were out of town, Q. had given Sarah and me our own room for a couple of nights, which he jokingly called a "conjugal room." We didn't think this was funny. One, it denoted a prison environment. Things were bad enough at Athens Christian Center, but it wasn't quite a prison, and we were hoping it wouldn't become one. (More later about that.) Two, having our own room didn't mean there was enough privacy to, uh, conjugate.

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: Part of what made our sound check so bad was Q., who sat down at Ben Dally's drum set and started banging clumsily on it while I was trying to tune my violin. I had to yell at the top of my lungs just to get his attention. The rest of the conversation went like this:

Me: What are you doing? I'm trying to tune here.
Q.: I'm trying to get the crowd pumped up.
Me: Right now I think it's more important that I be in tune.

Consider, dear reader: If Q. thought he could pump up a crowd with his lousy drumming, what did he need a band for?

15. The Basketball Diaries

2006-02-10T17:43:00.000-08:00

What means this noise?
Fellow, what miracle dost thou proclaim?
——Henry VI, Part II, II.i

Haply I see a friend will save my life
And pay the sum that may deliver me.
——The Comedy of Errors, V.i

Monday, August 23, was probably the most eventful day of my sojourn in Athens. So this promises to be the mother of all blog entries.

I'd like to begin, however, with ...

Today's Pearl of Wisdom. It comes from a little essay called "Faith and Basketball," which Q. published under his pseudonym. I won't reproduce the entire essay, but I'll summarize: During Q.'s junior-high days, an atheist classmate named Nigel challenges him to a game of HORSE to prove the existence of God. If Q. wins, there's a God; if Nigel wins, there isn't. (I'll offer two scriptural precedents. The first is Elijah's contest with the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings. The second is the devil's temptation of Jesus in Matthew. You might recall that Jesus won round 2 of that contest by telling the devil: "It is written, 'You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.'" But where's the fun in that?)

Anyhow, Q. accepts the challenge — Jesus' example notwithstanding. Nigel soon has him on the ropes; the score is Nigel H, Q. HORS. Q. prays for help, and "instantly," he writes, "I heard God say, 'Go for the impossible shots.'" So he starts flinging up the most ridiculous shots he can think of; they go in; he wins; and Nigel concedes the existence of God.

And that's our Pearl of Wisdom: "Go for the impossible shots." Believe it or not, I've actually found this phrase quite helpful as I've tried to make sense of what happened in Greece. I'll explain at the proper time, dear reader. For now, just try and keep this little lesson at the back of your mind.

A few blocks up Ermou Street from Monastiraki Square lies Syntagma Square, the grandest public space in modern Athens. It faces the Parliament building, known for its patrol of high-stepping guards in red fezzes and white kilts. Halfway between the two squares is a third, Mitropoleos, which lies in front of Athens' main Orthodox cathedral. (I wanted to have a look inside, but they won't let you in with shorts on, and I kept forgetting to wear my long trousers. Have I mentioned how hot it was in Athens?)

Across from the cathedral stands the edifice to which I owe my sanity. If Athens Christian Center was our home away from home, then the Mitropoleos Starbucks became our home away from Athens Christian Center during the ensuing week. Accompanied by Logan and Sarah, four band members — me, Holly, Brian, and Ben Dally — made our way there early Monday morning. (We invited Ben Paris and B., but they didn't come.) We drank coffee, ate pastries (including salty Greek cheese pies — yum!), complained, compared notes, prayed, strategized, and arrived at the following conclusions:

We wanted to have band meetings. Q.'s private chats with individual band members not only disrupted rehearsals, they created confusion because he said different things to different people. It amounted to a "divide and conquer" method of leadership.
We would request more practice time to try to nail down our eight strongest songs, which would constitute our set for the rest of our gigs. Michalis from Logos Music had invited us to audition that afternoon for a Tuesday showcase at an official Olympic venue — and more practice was the only way to prepare for that audition.
We'd already wasted loads of time because Q. seemed to be inventing our schedule as we went along — keeping us in limbo, sometimes for hours, until he told us what was next. If I was going to waste time, I wanted to do it out and about in Athens, not sitting around the courtyard waiting for Q. to make up his mind. So I was going to ask him for a daily schedule, or at least a time and place to meet for each day's gig.
I would play no more gigs without a bass player. Ben was miserable in his exile, and I thought it was time to show a little solidarity with him. We also needed him for the showcase. So if Q. kept him off the stage, I would stay off too.
We sounded better with just a djembe than a full trap set. It's easier to listen to each other that way.

Sarah was still helping Holly take care of Logan, but a funny thing happened that morning: We began to see childcare duty as something more than an onerous task. No one's more vulnerable than a baby, and here he was at 7 months old, in unfamiliar surroundings, sleeping in a wooden bureau drawer on a classroom floor (the promised crib having failed to materialize), and dependent on a mother who was completely stressed out. Yet he was happy — as long as he wasn't left in the classroom. He was also darn cute. Over the next two weeks, caring for Logan became a welcome distraction from all our woes, and served to remind us that some things are even more important than show business. We never could please Q., but Logan was in seventh heaven if I gave him an empty plastic water cup from Starbucks.

We worked our way back through the Plaka, Athens' famous flea market, to the church in time for morning worship. When we got back, (1) we learned that Ben Paris would rejoin the band that day; (2) Q. agreed to a meeting after worship to hear our Starbucks agenda. We felt downright encouraged as we gathered in the sanctuary for worship. Only Loudmouth and U4ic were present — the Youth in Action team having gone on a road trip to Corinth and points beyond.

This morning was, I think, our first exposure to Q.'s version of intercessory prayer. He solicits prayer requests through a page on his Web site, which promises that his "staff" will pray for them. So after we sang a few songs, Q. shuffled around distributing printed requests to four or five team members, who read them aloud and then offered prayers. I guess Sarah and I weren't deemed worthy of this honor, because neither of us ever got a request from Q.

Judging from the texts of the requests, the people sending them in were somewhere between tight spots and desperate straits. (Personally, when I have prayer requests I'd rather entrust them to friends or acquaintances than to an anonymous Web form — but maybe that's just me.) Most of them concerned medical or financial needs (or both, since the former tend to beget the latter) — my husband has Alzheimer's, my son has ADD, I need to buy a car, I'm afraid I can't make the rent, etc. Maybe it's just because I hang out with social workers all week, but I kept thinking, "Gee, what these people need is to be hooked up with some community resources."

Do I believe in the power of prayer? Absolutely. I don't think our prayers for those people were wasted, and I'll unequivocally state that I trust God to meet their needs. But I've said it before and I'll say it again: Prayer is no substitute for action. I have prayed for financial and medical needs as well, and so far, with one notable exception (see below), God has answered those prayers in the form of work opportunities, generous friends, and good doctors, not by effecting a miraculous healing or dropping a briefcase full of cash from the sky. And if we expect God to perform all the work of answering people's prayers, we thereby absolve ourselves from having to do anything to meet the needs of people around us.

Come to think of it, maybe that was the reason Q. never asked us — the people sitting right in front of him — what prayer requests we had. He expected us to pray for people we'd never met and weren't accountable to, but he didn't seem interested in our concerns. What would it take to get him to actually pray for one of us?

More later about that. Speaking of not being interested in our concerns, the next thing to happen was the band meeting. Instead of asking to hear our Starbucks agenda, Q. just began lecturing. He seemed to think our primary concern was about the venues we had played or were going to play (a topic that hadn't even come up at Starbucks). So he told us a story: In 2002, he'd taken Loudmouth to the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and had bookings fall through. But then, miraculously, at the last minute, there was a cancellation on some enormous stage right across from the Mormon Tabernacle, and Q. somehow managed to get Loudmouth into the open slot. So he, Q., was going to work just as hard in Athens as he had in Salt Lake, in the expectation that something was going to open up for us.

Well, that was my first clue that there had been any problems with bookings in Athens, or that we weren't booked us into the corporate-sponsored, Olympic-venue, thousands-of-people gigs Q. had promised. (I've mentioned that he sent Gilbert and Christian around Athens to beg for bookings — but at this point in my narrative I didn't know that.)*

Which brings me back to our Pearl of Wisdom. (The essay it comes from, by the way, was published a few months after the Salt Lake City Olympics.) You see, gentle reader, "Go for the impossible shots" was Q.'s approach to bookings as well as basketball. Apparently he'd either lost some of the fantastic bookings he claimed to have, or hadn't made the connections, paid the fees, submitted the applications, or whatever it is you do to get booked at the Olympics in the first place. But he still thought he could get us into those venues, merely because he wanted to. He seemed to think that whatever happened in Salt Lake City would happen again.**

Now the Salt Lake City tale is true according to B. and Holly, both of whom were there. I'm even willing to believe the basketball story. (I might have won a game or two of HORSE in that fashion myself as a lad, although none of them were burdened with such weighty theistic propositions.) But when you move from "I have experienced miracles" to "I expect a miracle to happen every time I think I need one," you have crossed a line, a phrase which here means that you now think the occurrence of miracles depends on you. Which is another way of saying you think you can work miracles.*** (Maybe that's why Q. brought Ken and Barbie along. More than once he introduced them with the phrase, "When they pray, miracles happen.")

I guess now would be the time to admit that I too have experienced miracles while doing music ministry. In Part 3 of this essay I mentioned how my tour with Continental Singers brought me back from the brink of suicide. As if that weren't miraculous enough, two other things happened that summer that I can't fully explain:

Continentals accepted me apparently in spite of my audition tape, which I hadn't approached very seriously. It included not only my viola playing but some Monty Python–style narration: "And now for something completely different — a C major scale."
I had to raise about $4,000 in support for that tour, and by the time we got to Washington, D.C., only $800 had come in. I was a few days away from being left behind; Continentals wouldn't take me to Europe with the deficit I had. But then the new choir director back at my home church — a woman I had never met — donated $2,500 from her late husband's estate in my support.

I do not, I cannot deny those miracles, gentle reader. They happened when I needed them most. But to think I could bottle such lightning and produce it on demand would amount to inconceivable hubris, not to mention heresy and blasphemy — at least to my way of thinking.

You know something? We're not even finished with Q.'s lecture yet. But we are finished with this entry. I'll pick up the thread in Part 16.

*In an earlier chapter I described how my trip to Greece almost didn't happen because of a quota on non-EU performers allegedly imposed by one of Q.'s concert sponsors. And I mentioned that money became an issue (all of a sudden I was expected to pay Sarah's airfare) shortly after the quota became a non-issue. Here's a hypothesis: Q. is negotiating a concert with a sponsor who's willing to pay but wants to impose a quota. But then the deal falls through (a fact Q. neglects to mention). Goodbye quota, but now Q. has to hit up the fiddle player for more money. It's just a hypothesis, but have you got a better one?

**I must admit that there is some support in Scripture for "Go for the impossible shots" in certain situations. The best example I can think of is Matthew 10:18–20:

You will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear testimony before them and the Gentiles. When they deliver you up, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.

Which will be a comfort to me next time I'm dragged before a governor or king. But I still don't know how you get from this verse to "Bring three bands to Athens; promise them the moon and hope they'll be satisfied when all they get is green cheese."

***Someone might say, "You're limiting God because you're not open to the possibility of him doing miracles." I'd reply, "No, you're limiting God because you're not open to the possibility of him doing anything but miracles."

16. That Giant Sucking Sound (You'll Never Make Lunch in This Town Again)

2006-02-10T17:42:00.000-08:00

I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs.
——As You Like It, II.v

May one be pardon'd and retain th' offence?
——Hamlet, III.iii

I began the previous entry with a piece of literature; I'd like to do the same with this one. A few months after I got back from Athens I went on a Robert Louis Stevenson binge, but I made room for a short novel by another 19th-century Scots author: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg. It's an odd little book, but it has its moments. You might enjoy it if you're interested in theology, Scottish political and religious history, or trying to decipher Scots dialect—all of which, it turns out, I find fascinating. I read it the old-fashioned way, but the complete text is online here.

Hogg's book explores the ramifications of antinomian theology. Succinctly, antinomianism is the heretical teaching that Christians are exempt from the moral law, a phrase which here means they can do whatever the hell they want because they're under God's grace. (Non-succinctly, you can read more about antinomianism than you'd ever want to know here). The once-popular (and extremely stupid) bumper-sticker slogan, "Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven," could be construed as a mildly antinomian statement.

The main character ("hero" he's not) of Private Memoirs is one Robert Wringhim (I hope that name doesn't remind you of something you'd like to do to someone's neck), who is so staunch in his antinomianism that he allows the devil (in the guise of a mysterious, protean being named Gil-Martin) to goad him into murdering his own half-brother. More than that I'll not disclose, but the genius of the book lies in Hogg's ability to draw a character who actually believes such a heinous crime is justified, as well as in the simultaneously terrifying and satisfying fate Hogg devises for Robert. At the end there is little room for doubt about Hogg's stance on antinomianism. But because he wrote his tract in the form of a ripping good yarn, it's much more effective than a mere polemic would have been.

I mention this because although most evangelical Christians these days don't profess or teach antinomianism, many of us still practice it. We do things we know are wrong and figure it's OK, because God will forgive us. I'm certainly guilty of this myself. Or we do things that aren't quite ethical, and rationalize that it's OK because we did them for the sake of ministry. For example, if I were organizing an overseas music-ministry tour, and I knew that some of the bookings I had promised the band were not going to materialize, it would be unethical of me not to tell the band before they got on the plane. I could either:

Keep mum about the booking problems, and justify my dishonesty with an antinomian line of thinking: "I need this band for ministry, and they might not come if they knew about the booking problems. I'll just pretend everything's OK and hope for last-minute miraculous bookings"; or
Honestly explain to the band: "We didn't get any of the big venues I talked about, and you won't be playing with the big-name Christian bands I mentioned. But you'll play for outreaches almost every night. It's an opportunity to minister—and who knows, we might get lucky with a bigger venue. Will you take a leap of faith and come anyway?"

If I wanted to impress the band with what a whiz-bang miracle-working big shot I was, I'd probably choose option 1. If I wanted to build a trusting relationship with them based on openness and integrity, I'd probably choose option 2.

But that's all hypothetical, of course. Now back to my narrative.

At this point our band meeting swiftly deteriorated. Brian left the room in disgust after a brief dispute with Q. over whether Brian, 20, needed adult supervision in Athens. The first item we presented from our Starbucks agenda—the need for more practice—met with unexpected opposition from E. Then Q. and E. left the room, Ken announced the meeting's sudden end, and the individual chats with band members resumed.

I finally acceded to one such chat with him myself, although I managed to have Ken, B., and Sarah present for a little accountability. (Negotiating this felt like a scene from a gangster flick: "I'm bringin' my consiglieri, my bodyguard, an' Cousin Guido. An' no funny business.") I later learned that Q. preferred one-on-ones because he was afraid of the band "ganging up" on him if we all met together. (Sound like a natural-born leader to you?) And although Q. protested that he couldn't provide a daily schedule because he wasn't a good communicator, I at least extracted from him an agreement to appoint Ken to tell us the time and place for each evening's gig. Ken and B. proved to be not so much neutral observers as Q.'s yes-man and apologist, respectively—but at least they witnessed the conversation. On the whole, I thought we succeeded in clearing the air. When the meeting ended, I felt pretty good.

But there are three kinds of good: (1) good; (2) too good to be true; (3) too good to last.

Loudmouth regrouped in the sanctuary for practice, but Brian was still missing. That's when B. delivered an announcement from Q.: Brian had left the building and wouldn't be playing that night's audition set.

So as soon as Q. had restored one band member, he'd suspended another. And for what? Well, we'd all witnessed Brian's offense: He dared to disagree with Q. in front of other people. Egad, was that all it took to get suspended? Was a mere disagreement the reason we'd played three gigs without a bass player? What kind of egomaniacal despots were running this circus?

My last shred of respect for Q. evaporated. We needed Brian. He was our best guitarist, and only his playing had kept us from falling completely apart at Koridallos. Furthermore, we were playing two of Brian's songs, with Brian on lead vocals. So I transferred my solidarity to Brian and told B. I wouldn't play without him. I agreed to rehearse anyway, in case Brian returned and Q. came to his senses.

Unexpectedly, we had a great rehearsal. We tightened up our set, nailed down our arrangements, and finally got the songs under our fingers without having to rely on charts. One possible reason: For once we went two or three hours without an interruption from Q. or Ken. Heck, they didn't even interrupt us for ...

Lunch.

Let's backtrack a little. Meals on this excursion were supposed to be covered, and Pandora was supposed to be our chef. She'd done the best she could with no cooking facilities: cereal for breakfast; cold cuts for lunch; rotisserie chickens from a local grocery for dinner; lots of salads. But she hadn't prepared a meal since Saturday night's hot-dog fiasco. (We went out for gyros on Sunday.) Today it was Ken who procured the cold cuts, but he didn't bother to tell the band. I don't think he got enough, because there wasn't much left when we finally finished practicing and went out in the courtyard looking for food.

Why, you ask, was Ken doing Pandora's job? Because it wasn't hers anymore—Q. fired her after she disagreed with him over the hot dogs. He tried to kick her out of Athens Christian Center, but she refused to leave, noting that she was the church's guest, not his. From that point on, we were on our own for dinner, and Q. took zero responsibility for per diems or reimbursements. Ken managed to keep the cereal coming for breakfast. Some days he got sandwich stuff for lunch; other days there was nothing but salty snack food. Pandora came and went the rest of the week, sleeping in the courtyard.

So on Friday Q. suspended Ben; on Saturday he fired Pandora; on Monday he suspended Brian. I guess Sunday was a day of rest.

Today's Pearl of Wisdom, below in boldface, is something E. said just before she left the band meeting. The conversation ran thusly:

E.: You guys sounded fine last night.
Us: No, we sucked.
E.: Don't worry about whether you suck. You're here to serve.
Me: But you don't serve by sucking.
E.: I'm not going to argue with you about it, Martin.

And she left. It's funny how quality of service was important to E. at a restaurant—she'd been downright nasty about it to a café waitress the day before—but it meant nothing to her where the band was concerned. Had she not left our meeting, I was going to tell her I agreed that the band shouldn't allow technical and musicianship issues to interfere with ministry—and that was precisely why we needed more rehearsal, so we could get those problems out of the way. I was going to say that I believe Christians should glorify God by striving for excellence in every endeavor, instead of expecting him to honor sloppy, half-baked work simply because we slap his name on it. (What does it say about our opinion of God when we don't even try to give him our best?) I was going to say that when you sound so bad that you're driving people away from an outreach instead of drawing them in, you shouldn't have to beg to be allowed to practice.

But apparently that wasn't a discussion she wished to have.

17. Like Mike

2006-02-10T17:41:00.000-08:00

How comes it, Michael, you are thus forgot?
——Othello, II.iii

Earlier I said that Q. reminded me of Michael Moore. Now another comparison occurs to me: Christian comedian Mike Warnke. I was once a big fan of Mike, and even used to call him "my favorite theologian" in my high school years. (This was before I'd read Frederick Buechner, Walter Wangerin, C. S. Lewis, or Henri Nouwen, let alone any more, um, serious theologians.)

If you want to unmask the closet antinomians in a roomful of evangelical Christians, just mention Mike Warnke's name. You see, in 1992 Cornerstone magazine conclusively debunked Mike's claims about his past as a drug-pushing, pimping Satanist high priest—and, to boot, exposed him as a quadruple-divorced charlatan bilking evangelicals to the tune of $800,000 a year. The teen-crisis hotline Mike used to raise funds for? Didn't exist. Mike never answered any of Cornerstone's specific charges, responding only with denial and vague evasion. Yet people will still leap to his defense because his "ministry" was so effective—and in fact he's still out there kicking around, although I gather he doesn't talk much about the Satanist stuff anymore.

Compared to, say, Robert Tilton or Paul Crouch, Mike was only a mid-level con artist. And compared to Mike, Q. is only a two-bit con artist. But when I get around to talking about the results of our Athens outreach (which I will, in the interest of fairness and honesty), a certain segment of the population will want me to "forgive and forget" Q.'s shortcomings because "God is using him" to "reach people." (There's even a primal corner in my own fundamentalist-raised brain that still reacts this way.) So here are a few preemptive points:

Forgiving bad behavior and allowing it to continue are two separate things. Jesus forgave the woman caught in adultery (John 8), but he also told her, "Go thou, and sin no more."
Yes, God used Q. And Mike Warnke. God may have used Bob Tilton (I doubt it, but if it happened I'm sure it's written down someplace). Heck, God used me, all my bitterness notwithstanding. The point: Sometimes God, being God, finds a way to use us despite our imperfections. That hardly renders our imperfections irrelevant. If the Golden Gate Bridge had a cracked girder, God could still drive across it—but the rest of us might want it repaired.
God used Balaam's ass (Numbers 22). That doesn't entitle the people he uses to behave like barnyard animals.
I don't know of any evangelicals calling for a "forgive and forget" approach to the Roman Catholic clerical sex-abuse scandal. Do we have different standards for Them than we do for Us?

After the Cornerstone article was published, Mike set up a board of ministers to keep him "accountable." The accountability didn't include answering the charges, but it did seem to slow down Mike's divorce/remarriage rate. Q., too, claims to be accountable to a board—but unlike Mike, he won't identify the board's members. (Q.'s concert ministry purports to be a nonprofit. I've looked, but I can't find any evidence that it's registered as such. Registered nonprofits are required to publish their board members' names.)

Also like Mike, Q. persists in telling tall tales. Here's a quote from his Web site:

For the past three Olympics we have produced concerts at various venues in the host cities. Some sponsored by large corporations, some sponsored by the host city Olympic committee.

Perhaps Q.'s Salt Lake City miracle meets that description. (I don't know what he did at the Sydney Olympics. I heard it alleged that he had a booth there and gave away CDs, but didn't bring any bands—but I don't know if that's true.) However, if he produced any concert in Athens that was sponsored by a large corporation or the host city Olympic committee, I sure would have liked to be there.

"But wait," you say. "What about that showcase you auditioned for? Wasn't it at an official Olympic venue?"

Which brings me back to my narrative.

Brian returned to Athens Christian Center after our rehearsal ended. Lucky guy, he'd gone off by himself for a little sightseeing—something I'd been itching to do for days. Q. relented and let him back in the band, and there was no further talk of his needing adult supervision. I don't know whether my show of solidarity had anything to do with this. Holly walked Brian through our new arrangements, which he absorbed immediately.

We auditioned on an Olympic stage sponsored by the Athens Ministry of Culture and located smack in front of the Athens Theatre Museum (an interesting place, judging from the 10 minutes that Sarah and I grabbed to walk through it), a couple blocks from the Panepistimiou Metro station. Nearby there's a bust of Nikos Kazantzakis (author of The Last Temptation of Christ), a fact I kept pretty much to myself. And someone in the band mentioned that the Orthodox Metropolitan (bishop) of Athens lived next to the museum, although I don't know if it's true.

Most of our audience were other performers auditioning for the same showcase. We met the Russ Rosen Band, Raw Motion, and a troupe of Native American musicians from Vancouver. Our set that afternoon was the tightest we ever played. It certainly didn't hurt to have cool stuff like professional sound technicians and a good monitor mix, not to mention a successful rehearsal under our belts. That rehearsal wasn't exactly enjoyable, but the audition certainly was. As far as I'm concerned, we eclipsed "not so much a band" status the moment we hit the first chord. Loudmouth became, for the first time, an actual band. We clicked. We liked playing together. We felt that we had something to say—musically and lyrically—and deserved to be on that stage.

John Lee Hooker has been quoted as saying that he endured twenty-two and a half hours of misery and pain every day for the sake of the 90 minutes he got to spend on stage at night. Or words to that effect. Well, every member of Loudmouth knows what he meant. As I told someone later in the week, our gigs were the only time I felt like a human being. That audition gave us hope that the experience of performing would be worth all the crap we were going through.

But in so hoping, we underestimated Q., whose idea of a successful trip did not include band members feeling like human beings, or experiencing joy and a sense of unity through their music. More later about that.

In case you're wondering, we passed the audition and came back the next day for the showcase. Now whereas the venue sponsor was the Ministry of Culture, the showcase was sponsored by Flame 2004, a joint evangelism venture by several missionary organizations and dozens of Greek churches doing Olympic outreach. They had arranged to use the venue during "off" hours, when Ministry of Culture–sponsored bands weren't playing. Flame 2004 was spearheaded by AMG International, the Tennessee-based parent organization of Logos Music. (I’ve already mentioned More than Gold, another organization that specializes in evangelism at international sports events. Naturally they too were involved in Flame 2004.) AMG also built and operated the Cosmovision Center, a multipurpose facility on the outskirts of Athens, where Loudmouth was scheduled to play on August 29.

So if we had a sponsor, it was Flame 2004, which is neither a large corporation nor the host city Olympic committee. And our appearances at that stage were bones thrown to Q. by Michalis the day before they took place—not something Q. had booked in advance. To claim that Q. produced those concerts is to do him far too much credit.

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: Q. allegedly told Holly that the bands who played the showcase were expected not to be overly preachy or evangelistic. That's his only concession to the anti-proselytization law that I know of. So we said nothing between songs, although our lyrics contained plenty of Christian imagery and references to God, oblique or otherwise. Russ Rosen, on the other hand, preached up a storm and got away with it. Which is great. One doesn't expect to worry about one's free-speech rights in the cradle of democracy.

I'm not saying we wanted to preach—we were more focused on communicating through the music. Nor could anyone predict how the rules would be enforced at any given moment. The irony here is that the Q. was more of an enemy to free speech than the Greek government turned out to be. We'd all seen what he did when Brian, Ben, and Pandora spoke their minds.

18. Trust Me, Kid, I'm Gonna Make You a Star

2006-02-10T17:40:00.000-08:00

This will prove a brave kingdom to me, where I shall have my music for nothing.
——The Tempest, III.ii

Four entries are enough to spend on a single day, so I'll wrap up Monday for you. On the way back from the audition, the band decided to try to squeeze in an evening rehearsal. Sarah and I stopped by the corner café at Thissio Square and bought a dozen gyros for the band, no other source of dinner being apparent. I think we actually did get in a little practice that evening, but we had to wait until 10 p.m. to start because the congregation of Athens Christian Center was using the sanctuary for a Monday night service.

At some point on Monday or Tuesday, I had a talk with B. (In fact, what follows is most likely a conflation of several talks with B. It's hard to keep all of this straight. I should have been taking notes!) He explained Q.'s failure to establish a schedule thusly: "He gets something booked, and then he tries to get something better." In other words, Q. couldn't tell us in the morning where we'd be playing at night, because with Q. no booking was final. At any time he might make one of those impossible shots and get something in a bigger venue.

What a way to manage a band, eh? A sponsor who expected to host a concert on a given evening had better hope Q. didn't find a more advantageous booking. I know bands cancel and reschedule all the time, but I doubt most of them are still actively trying to do it on the day of the gig. I wondered what kind of mess would result if this approach ever succeeded.

More later about that.

I asked B. about the big-name bands, specifically Switchblade, that hadn't materialized in Athens. He suggested that the deal had collapsed because Switchblade made unreasonable demands. I joked: "You mean they wanted only brown M&Ms?" He chuckled, but wouldn't divulge exactly what the demands were. Say it with me, kids: More later about that.

B. also described his incentive-loaded songwriting contract with Q., which struck me as the worst one since Ricky Williams signed with the New Orleans Saints.* Before I go into detail, allow me to emphatically restate the caveat that I may have misunderstood B.

Traditionally, songwriters get income from two sources: royalties (based on sales) and ASCAP/BMI fees (based on airplay). But if I understood B. correctly, his contract required him to forfeit both of these. Instead he was supposed to get a flat fee (it wasn't any more than $100, might have been less) for each song he wrote for Q. (I don't know whether he was to be paid for every song, or just for the ones Q. accepted.) The incentives kicked in if a song hit the Christian charts. I forget the exact numbers, but the higher a song charted, the more money B. was supposed to get—still all flat fees, and a few thousand bucks maximum.

The trouble, of course, is that not all the songs you write will be recorded. Of the ones that are, only a few get released as singles, and only a few of those do well on the Christian charts (unless you're Steven Curtis "34 Dove Awards and Counting" Chapman). Furthermore, Q. hadn't demonstrated that he could get a single recorded, mixed, released, and distributed, let alone onto the Christian charts. (He claimed to have sent a pre-release of Loudmouth's single, "Come Thou Fount," to hundreds of Christian radio stations. If he actually sent it anywhere, it was to the K-LOVE network, a sort of Christian Clear Channel. It does operate about 200 stations around the country—but with one playlist. I think K-LOVE was also on the other end of the brief phone interviews that some of the band members did two or three times a day—during which they were supposed to plug Q.'s Web site and the CDs, of course. Airplay on a network that big is nothing to sneeze at, but it doesn't equal chart placement. And even if it did, "Come Thou Fount" is a public-domain hymn that B. did not write, and to which his contract as he described it to me would not apply.)

Even more frightening: According to another friend of mine who makes his living as a Christian singer/songwriter and owner of a small indie label, the Christian charts are essentially controlled by one man: a Nashville "song merchandiser" who's paid big bucks by major Christian labels to listen to their records and tell them which songs to release as singles. (That may be why all the songs on Christian radio sound the same. When I'm in a different city and flipping through radio channels, I can usually identify a Christian station in less than five seconds of listening.)

So B.'s incentives were almost entirely beyond his control. They depended not only on Q. getting his act together but on the songs appealing to this merchandiser. Neither eventuality seemed very probable, judging from what I'd seen of Q., what I knew of B.'s writing, and what I'd heard on Christian radio.

How, you might ask, did B. get involved with Q. in the first place? Well, B. had been praying and seeking direction about his musical future when Q. called him out of the blue and described his vision for assembling a number-one** Christian worship band. Upon learning that Q. had already achieved his earlier vision of having the number-one distributed piece of Bible software, B. figured, "Well, maybe he can do it with a band too." (However, if Q.'s Bible software really is the most widely distributed—a proposition that I seriously doubt—it is only because he gives it away, a process that may work for software but has never been shown to establish a new band as "number one" in any meaningful sense in any market, Christian or otherwise.)

B.'s contract also entitled him to lots of those one-on-one chats with Q.—sometimes at 3 a.m. Apparently it wasn't enough that Q. suffered from insomnia in Athens—he had to inflict it on B. by waking him up and talking to him in the middle of the night. B. has a wife and four kids, and the contract with Q. was his only source of income at the time. Q. was paying him for the Greece trip, or at least had promised to. So I can understand B.'s inclination to extend the benefit of the doubt to Q. a lot further than I would. He was in this a lot deeper than I was.

Up to his neck, you might say.

The more Sarah and I learned about Q., the less inclined we were to hand out his CDs. We'd grown suspicious of them after E. expressed pleasure at the increased Web traffic the outreach was generating. We thought the purpose of outreach was to tell people about God, not to send them shopping for software. I kept one of the CDs, and a couple of months back I finally broke down and installed Q.'s software on my laptop, just to see exactly what we'd been offering people back in Athens. Five days later, my laptop stopped working because the HIMEM.SYS file had mysteriously disappeared. Of course it could just be a coincidence. More later about that.

On Tuesday, Q. and E. went out to find a laundromat. Meanwhile B. and I worked with Hannah, the 14-year-old U4ic singer, trying to nail down an arrangement for a song she wanted to do: "I Can Only Imagine," a syrupy CCM number that became an unlikely crossover hit on the pop charts for a Texas band called Mercy Me. The poor girl had sung this song only to backing tracks, never with live musicians. She didn't know what key she wanted. She had a chord chart—evidently prepared by a nonmusician, because it was indecipherable. We worked all afternoon and got the thing partially arranged, but it still wasn't ready before we had to depart for Hope Place (and thence to the showcase).

Halfway there, we met Q., on his way back with the laundry. He bet me 2 euros he could drop the laundry at Athens Christian Center and still beat us back to Hope Place. Understand: We had left point A and were standing at point B on our way to point C. Now Q. was claiming he could travel BA + AC in less time than it would take us to travel BC. He lost the bet, but never paid up—not that I considered it worth 2 euros to have to remind him. You see, dear reader, it didn't matter whether the issue was daily meals for us, backline for Qedem, a crib for the baby, or a measly 2-euro bet: Q. had no regard for his own promises. Just where did this guy draw the line when it came to keeping his word?

More later about that. (How did you know I was going to say that?) I made up my mind not to ask Q. for anything, even if it cost me 2 euros plus whatever I spent on food. Call it pride if you want to.

About the laundry: There was a perfectly good sink at Athens Christian Center for washing clothes and a perfectly good fence for drying them. That's how Sarah and I did our laundry. But Q. convinced most of the other band members that he knew of a reasonably priced laundromat. Well, it turned out to be not so reasonable. In fact, laundromats in Greece are expensive, a compound word formed from the prefix ex-, meaning "out of," and the root pensive, meaning "thoughtful or mindful." As in, "Thirty euros for my laundry? That's twice what you told me it would cost! Are you out of your mind?"

Maybe that's why Q. didn't pay up on our bet.

The showcase went well, although once again our audience was mostly other performers. A camera crew came by and shot some footage of the band. Afterward Q. had us reprise part of our set on a one-microphone PA in a little park near the Metro station. Then it was on to Monastiraki Square for another marathon outreach with Elias: guerrilla-style, no stage, just another small PA, this one with about four channels.

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: In a rare display of sensitivity and generosity, Q., realizing how tired we were, engaged a couple of taxis to take band members from Panepistimiou to Monastiraki. Slight problem there: Holly preferred to take Logan on the Metro, which she judged to be a safer mode of transportation for a 7-month-old baby, given her lack of an infant car seat and the way Athens cabbies operate their vehicles. She was essentially slapping away Q.'s magnanimous gesture, and I could almost feel sorry for him, except that (1) Holly was right; (2) Q. proceeded to argue with her until she finally agreed to take the taxi just to get him off her back.

For dinner at Monastiraki, one of the German kids gave me a ham sandwich (they'd been distributed at Hope Place after Loudmouth left there). I bought some souvlaki for Sarah, then couldn't find her. She went hungry all night. I sat in with Qedem on an acoustic set as well as playing twice with Loudmouth. When not performing, I kept an eye on our cases and gear, which were piled on a curb under the supervision of Jeff, our volunteer from Korea. He was a nice guy but didn't cut a very imposing figure—anyone could have knocked him down and grabbed something. And I was afraid someone would—the later it got, the noisier and rougher the crowd got. But in the end, nothing was stolen, nothing was broken, and nobody got hurt.

And when that's your definition of a good gig, you know you're in trouble.

*This contract was negotiated by rapper/producer Master P, who had never done a sports contract before and probably won't be doing many more. Ricky could have picked a better agent out of a police lineup.

**And what does "number-one" really mean, anyway? Remember, Q. had a remarkable gift for vagueness, nicely illustrated by a conversation at Athens Christian Center in which he insisted that Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus" was the number-one song of the 1980s. It turned out that he'd been listening to an '80s nostalgia station on which that was the most-requested song—which is hardly the same thing as the commonly understood meaning of a number-one song. So perhaps when he told B. he was trying to manufacture a number-one worship band, Q. really meant he was going to assemble a band that would have most-requested status on a nostalgia radio station 20 years from now.

19. Head for the Hills

2006-02-10T17:39:00.000-08:00

Now for our mountain sport: up to yond hill.
——Cymbeline, III.iii

Everywhere you go in Athens, you will see stray cats. They hide in alleys, sun themselves in front of ancient monuments, and beg for scraps at sidewalk cafés. You'll also find the occasional dog, but it's the cats who run the place. Late one night, walking back through the Plaka, we spotted nine of them sitting in an alley behind a metal roll-down gate. They'd arranged themselves in a neat 3x3 tic-tac-toe grid, and cast appealing glances at us in unison as we passed by.

I don't know how they got up there, but stray cats even roam atop the Acropolis. I know, because that's where I went with Sarah and Desiree on Wednesday morning after we returned from Starbucks. Q. had postponed morning worship until 1 p.m., so we finally had some free time. Hannah and Holly were supposed to come along, but they changed their minds.

I'm sure you can find 1,001 flowery descriptions of the Acropolis on travel sites if you want. Providing another such description is not the purpose of this essay. As theatre geeks, Sarah and I were most impressed with the Theatre of Dionysus, which, although it lies in ruins at the base of the hill, still has perfect natural acoustics. There we were, on the spot where theatre began 2,500 years ago. It doesn't get much cooler than that.

A little further up the path is another theatre, the fully restored Odeon of Herod Atticus. As I gazed at this marble-seated marvel, it suddenly occurred to me: I was standing on the very spot where Yanni recorded his sublimely fantastic Live at the Acropolis album. As I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply but serenely through my nostrils, the cerulean of the sky echoing against my eyelids, so near I could almost taste it, the clear limpid notes of his synthesizer seemed to float past my ears on the morning breeze, and I could sense that the spirit of peace and harmony summoned by his deep, healing melodies had not entirely left that sacred place—no—no, there was still something of it on the leaves of the trees, in the dust of the ground, beneath the wings of the insects, hanging in the atmosphere like a gorgeous blanket woven with invisible silver thread, ah, the remnants of that delicious landscape of sound, still pulsating through my brain in delightful waves...was it possible my consciousness could absorb such powerful mystical potency and still remain connected to this earth, or had I at last stepped beyond the thresholds of time, through the veil of space, past the mailbox of mundaneness, into another dimension, a new level of awareness, a hitherto unknown plane of existence where all my difficulties with Q. would be no more relevant than a third-generation cassette copy of a mimeograph of a shortwave radio broadcast of a telegram of a barely remembered nightmare?

Then I heard Sarah's voice and felt a hand on my forehead. Seems I'd slipped on the stairs and gotten a pretty good bump. So in reply to the previous paragraph, the answer is no, and Yanni sucks (although I knew another violinist or two in California who made good money playing for him and John Tesh).

There's a pretty good museum atop the Acropolis now, containing what's left of the original statues and carvings (i.e., what wasn't blasted off, or cut down and hauled away by the Turks or Lord Elgin) from the various ancient buildings there. (Any statue you might see outdoors on the Acropolis is pretty much guaranteed to be a modern copy—the Caryatides on the famous Porch of Maidens, for example.) The Parthenon was surrounded by construction scaffolding; it's undergoing the latest in a series of renovations to repair the damage it suffered in 1687 from a gunpowder explosion. The idea behind the current project is to restore as much original marble as humanly possible. So there are piles of blocks and bits lying around, all numbered and waiting to be fitted back into the puzzle, and providing shelter for the stray cats in the meantime.

The Acropolis is hot, dry, and dusty, so don't forget your water bottle when you visit (that pretty much goes for the entire city of Athens). There is a drinking fountain at the Odeon if you need it. While it's not the world's hardest climb, the Acropolis isn't all that convenient either—and must have been even less so for the ancient Greeks. So visiting the temple of Athena couldn't have been an easy task. This got me thinking about where various religions fall on the difficulty-convenience spectrum. Ancient Mayan temples had steep stone steps to climb. Islam has the hajj to Mecca. Roman Catholicism has pilgrimages, labyrinths, and Stations of the Cross. And American Protestantism builds megachurches 3 minutes or less from freeway exits.

When you buy tickets to the Acropolis, you also get admission to several other sites, including the Ancient Agora, the famous former open-air marketplace, now a partially wooded park filled with crumbling ruins. So on the way back we walked across the Agora to Adrianou Street, on the edge of the Plaka. We visited a bizarre little antique shop crowded with shadow puppets, jewelry, and dusty musical instruments, where we persuaded Desiree to buy herself a beautiful beaded clutch for 20 euros.

It was fun to get Desiree away from the rest of the group and get to know her a little better. I don't think she'd done much touring or been out of the States before. And perhaps, lacking experience against which to compare the trip, she was better able to take Q.'s abuse in stride. We learned that she'd been offered the trip because she won a prize in a regional teen talent show sponsored by the Assemblies of God. And she was talented—had a powerful voice and was a solid guitarist. As I recall, we had no particular desire to drag her into our misery, so we tried to keep the conversation positive.

We sat down at a Cretan sidewalk café and had, for the first time in days, a decent meal. Since Pandora's departure we'd subsisted on Starbucks pastries, whatever Ken brought from the grocery store, and gyros. Lots of gyros. Or souvlaki. But we had come to understand that while they taste yummy, gyros and souvlaki are greasy fast food, and a steady diet of them can't be that good for you. If we had been working on Συπερσιζε Με, our documentary film, this would have been fine. But we were instead trying to keep our moods and energy levels sufficiently elevated to survive the stress we were under, and you can't do that on a steady diet of gyros. So we had a nummy little sampler plate, some salad, and really terrific bread. I got brave and tried a frappé, which is a cold blended instant coffee drink that everybody in Greece seems to love. Everybody but me, that is.

As we ate we realized it was past 1 p.m., and we were missing worship back at the church. But we didn't make particular haste to return, which turned out to be a good thing. Our Russian friends came by the café while we were finishing up, and told us we were going to have worship on top of the Areopagos, a/k/a Mars Hill. Which is right next to the Acropolis, so we'd have wasted the walk back to Athens Christian Center if we had taken it. Which brings me to...

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: I don't know why Q. hadn't told anyone he intended to meet at Mars Hill. Maybe he thought we couldn't find it. Or maybe he wanted it to be a surprise, in which case he had failed to realize that the last thing anyone needed from him was another surprise.

In ancient Athens, Mars Hill was the hangout of the Areopagites, a/k/a the Athens Philosophy Club. The Apostle Paul preached to them on one of his missionary voyages (Acts 17). In an early example of the importance of contextualization for missionaries, he referred to an altar he'd seen bearing the inscription "To an Unknown God" (it was probably in Piraeus, the port city just to the southwest of Athens), and even quoted Greek poetry.

Just like the worshipers at the Parthenon, the Areopagites must have been dedicated fellows. Mars Hill is accessible by a treacherous old stone stairway and a less treacherous modern metal one, but I'm not sure either was available in Paul's time. There's nary a flat place to stand on the summit, which is surfeited with jagged rocks worn slippery by thousands of years of sore philosophers' feet. Nonetheless, we clambered up there, French, German, Russian, Yank and all—even Gilbert, who never let his disability get between him and someplace he really wanted to go. It was thrilling to stand and sing on the spot where Christianity was introduced to Athens. The only noticeable problem with the picture was Q., who stood sullenly by and glowered the whole time, something he'd been doing a lot of lately.

Back at Athens Christian Center, Q. was wearing out his welcome with Haris, the overworked part-time youth minister. Whoever was sleeping in the church office had failed to keep it locked, so Haris asked Q. to move those people out. Church members were tired of stepping over air mattresses and having their microphones and gear messed with, so Haris asked Q. to move the mattresses out and desist from further use of the sound system. Meanwhile the Youth in Action group had returned from their trip to Corinth. As a consequence of all this, Sarah and I lost our "conjugal room"—the only one on the ground floor with a door that locked—to Q., E., Ken, and Barbie. We got back from the Acropolis to find our mattresses and suitcases against one wall, and theirs on the floor.

I spent the rest of the afternoon with B., trying to finish our arrangement for Hannah. This actually involved finding an Internet café near the Plaka and printing the lyrics off the Web, just so we could make a fresh chord chart (the first one having been obscured by the corrections, transpositions, and key changes we'd made). This endeavor made me late for the evening's gathering at Hope Place. When I did get there it was packed to the gills. I walked in, had an attack of claustrophobia,* and walked out.

Q. and I barely spoke together after Monday morning. Instead we used B. as a sort of shuttle diplomat. His first mission was to offer me and Sarah the chance to leave the band and go home early, provided we could change our plane tickets. Since I didn't know anything about our flight home, I asked him to get our travel itineraries from E. so I could call the airline. (I certainly wasn't going to trust E. to make that call for me.) As I've said, Q. seemed to respect me more than the other band members (even though I no longer held any regard at all for him), so maybe this was his idea of a polite way to get rid of me. I chose to defer any decision about leaving the band until I knew whether it was possible to fly home early. So I continued to play gigs.

Speaking of gigs, this evening we were back at Eleftherias Square in Koridallos. I'd love to say it went much better than Sunday night, but that's only partially true. I tuned up my instruments and left them too close to the fountain. They didn't exactly get wet, but thanks to the humidity, my violin popped a peg and went severely out of tune, which I didn't discover until I picked it up and tried to play the introduction to "Breathe on Me." After two days of arrangement work, Hannah finally got to sing her song. Qedem had their distortion pedal and played their first full-on rock sets of the trip, which took some of the pressure off of Loudmouth in terms of the number of sets we played. By now we knew Q. wasn't going to feed us, so we hit the neighborhood cafés for more greasy souvlaki in between sets.

Somehow, though, Sarah again got nothing to eat, which doesn't make me look like a very attentive husband. I barely remember seeing her that night, even when we got back to Athens Christian Center—because of course we weren't sleeping together, having been evicted from our conjugal room. The idea of a married couple sleeping apart on a road trip may not sound so bad, but believe me, at this point in the trip we needed each other's support and company as much as possible. We didn't know who else we could trust. Our fantastic four leaders had each other's company and a little privacy, even though they all were sharing one room at this point. But somehow it was OK to split up Martin and Sarah. I think Sarah was in with Holly and the U4ic girls, while I grabbed my mattress and headed unhappily for the courtyard. On my way there, E. offered to let me sleep in the sanctuary. I took this to mean that she and Q. were willing to give lip service to Haris' instructions and then flout them as soon as his back was turned. Wanting no part in that, I told her to forget it.

*I'm only mildly claustrophobic, and my use of the term may not even be clinically accurate. I've only had two such attacks in my lifetime (both in Europe, oddly enough).

20. There Is a Quiet Place—But It Ain't Here

2006-02-10T17:36:00.000-08:00

She ate no meat to-day, nor none shall eat;
Last night she slept not, nor to-night she shall not.
——The Taming of the Shrew, IV.i

On Thursday morning we returned from Starbucks a little late for our 10:30 a.m. worship service. It didn't matter, though, because Q. wasn't even up yet. Eventually he dragged himself out to the courtyard and sat on a bench, blinking. Whatever the poor guy had been up to the night before, it hadn't involved sleep. I had some sympathy for his fatigue—we were staying up later and later after gigs, and all of us were looking and feeling worn out. I find it next to impossible to sleep in when I'm traveling—I always seem to wake up between 6 and 7 a.m., so if I want more sleep I have to go to bed earlier. Q. seemed too tired to even go through the motions of singing with us, but I think he did manage to distribute a few prayer requests from his Web site.

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: Ken, Barbie, and E., who usually joined us for these worship services, were absent, so I asked Q. where they were. "Oh," he said, "they're out running errands." Later, when the trio returned, I asked them how their day had been. That's when I learned that Q. had lied to us. They'd been watching an Olympic event (I forget what, maybe kayaking).

You'll recall, gentle reader, that long before we reached Athens, Q. and E. had promised that we'd attend an Olympic event together. I assumed they'd be obtaining tickets for said event, since they hadn't asked us for money for them. And once we got there, Q. repeatedly boasted, "People [what people he didn't specify] are giving me free tickets all the time, so you can go see something if you want to." Cory, the South African leader of our Russian team, apparently did have a ticket source, so his team attended quite a few events. But as far as I can tell, Q., despite his boasting, managed to score only three free tickets during his entire stay. He might even have gotten them from Cory. Since it wouldn't be fair to give tickets to some band members and not others, he gave them instead to Ken, Barbie, and E. Only he forgot to tell them to keep mum.

Catching Q. in a lie did nothing to lower my opinion of him, which had already hit bottom. I didn't even bother to call him on it. I don't remember much about the rest of the day. There was one day, and this might have been it, when Q. actually left us to our own devices for 2–3 hours, saying, "See, I give you guys time off."

That night's gig was in Vathis Square, a seedy little spot north of Omonoia frequented by pimps, prostitutes, drunks, and junkies. It would be difficult to imagine a public space in Athens filled with people in more dire need of the Gospel. I must admit that my own participation in spreading said Gospel amounted to little more than playing in the band—and with U4ic—and with Proin, Philemon's band. Heck, I played with every band except Qedem, who didn't need me now that they had their distortion pedal. When I wasn't playing I was, for the most part, backstage keeping an eye on our gear, because once again it was sitting out in the open and I didn't trust anyone else to watch it for me. I may have handed out a Bible or two, but I didn't do much more than that.

The French kids arrived at the square hoping to give one last performance before leaving to board their plane home. Unfortunately, we were late getting set up, and their time ran out while they were waiting. There wasn't much to do but hug a few tearful kids and wish them bon courage, bon voyage, and above all, bon fromage.

By this point, pretty much everyone in the band was operating in "survival mode"—meaning that psychologically, we'd adopted a defensive posture toward Q. and anything associated with him. This meant keeping our distance whenever possible, both physically and emotionally; trying to keep all interactions with him—even positive ones—as brief and uneventful as possible; and doing only what it took to get by. Some other band members still found a way to proselytize, even in survival mode, but I didn't. I had too many reservations about Q. and his methods. It hurts to say it, but I wasn't convinced that Christianity as practiced by Q. was something that ought to be spread around—so I was reluctant to help him spread it. There were, however, plenty of folks from Greeks for Christ and Elias' organization, Passage to Life, working the crowd while he preached.

As for Sarah, she split her time that evening between watching the baby and being propositioned by a pimp. But in the end, as we like to say in the business, nothing was stolen, nothing was broken, and nobody got hurt.

So you can see, perhaps, why I wasn't in such a buoyant mood at 12:30 a.m. when we got back to Athens Christian Center. I was determined to go to bed as soon as possible, but that proved difficult.

First we came upon Ken and Barbie, who were lying uncomfortably on the floor in the hallway, having been locked out of the room they were sharing with Q. and E. We offered to let them stretch out on the extra air mattresses in our room, but they declined.

About our room: Fortunately our separation had lasted only one night, and Sarah and I were now staying in another "conjugal room," which, although technically private, wasn't very quiet. Its window opened onto the same courtyard as the window in the shower room, so we could hear anyone taking a shower. Also, not everyone seemed inclined to go to bed. Loud talking persisted out in the hallway for an hour, with no evident attempt by Q. or anyone else to get people to quiet down.

This pattern of behavior had been established over the course of previous evenings, and I doubt it crossed anyone's mind that they were keeping people awake. On other nights I'd been just as guilty as anyone else of staying up too late, but I no longer wanted to participate.

I'm what pop psychologists call a "slow boiler"; instead of dealing with situations as soon as they turn negative, I tend to hold my feelings in until I can no longer contain them. I'd been boiling for a week now, and I lay on my air mattress, getting angrier and more frustrated every minute. Just then, E. and Barbie decided to take a shower. As if that weren't loud enough, they also started to carry on a conversation, shouting to each other over the sound of the running water.

After a few minutes of this, Sarah suggested that we pray together. So we tried, but the noise was even more of an impediment to prayer than it was to sleep. Mid-prayer I decided I'd had enough. I got up, burst into the hallway, and started yelling at the top of my lungs for people to be quiet. The nearest person to the door was Hannah, and I gave her quite a start.

Of course that was the wrong thing to do. My behavior wasn't any more appropriate than that of the people I was yelling at, and Sarah told me so as soon as I got back into the room. Meanwhile, my yelling had gotten the attention of E., who cut her shower short and stormed down the hallway toward the room she was sharing with Q., all the while yelling about how awful I was (in a voice even louder than the one she'd been using in the shower).

Before long Q. burst in, without knocking, and admonished me. Everyone had gathered in the courtyard, he said, and now he, Q., had to go out and explain to them that I wasn't a jerk. He also denied making any contribution to the noise problem, even though (1) for the first half hour after I went to bed, his had been one of the voices in the hall; (2) part of leadership means taking responsibility when you let things get out of control. Nonetheless, I remained calm, apologized, and after a few minutes, followed him out to the courtyard. I repeated my apology to everyone there, after which they gathered around me and prayed some more. This prayer was led by Ken, who put his hand on me and implored God to give me "supernatural sleep" so that I'd be miraculously refreshed in the morning. I was genuinely affected by everyone's concern, but by the time I got back to the conjugal room I was already analyzing Ken's prayer.

"These people treat prayer like magic beans," I told Sarah. "They don't provide enough leadership or discipline to allow us time to sleep, and when that becomes a problem they want God to snap his fingers and fix it." It reminded me of the way they planned concert bookings.

With the hallway quiet at last, we got some sleep, which was not supernatural as far as I could tell. Yet when I rose Friday morning I learned that my outburst, rude as it was, had borne results. First, Q. and E. had instituted quiet hours: all of a sudden it was verboten to talk in the hall before 10 a.m. Of course this meant the early-to-bed/early-to-rise crowd, like me, were expected not to disturb the late sleepers, like Q.—instead of the other way around. No problem, since I was spending every morning at Starbucks. And at least Q. had done something.

The second result: E. finally coughed up the plane itinerary for me and Sarah, and when she did she repeated the invitation for us to leave the group—which was sounding more and more like what we really ought to do. We decided to devote the day to finding out whether it was feasible.

But that's a tale for another entry.

21. No Room at the Inn

2006-02-10T17:35:00.000-08:00

The general so likes your music, that he desires you, for love's sake, to make no more noise with it.
——Othello, III.i

Armed at last with our plane itinerary, Sarah and I burst forth upon Athens with a purpose: to break free of Q. and establish ourselves independently for the remainder of our stay. I don't know if you've ever sought lodgings in an Olympic host city on the Friday before the Games closed, but I don't recommend it. The responses from hotel clerks ranged from incredulous looks to snickers. One of them actually had a room, but for only one night. Discouraged, we retreated for lunch to a delightful sidewalk seafood restaurant on the back side of the Ancient Agora, then went in search of Olympic event tickets, finally aware that Q. wouldn't be giving us any. (He had organized a Saturday morning trip to some event—women's handball, maybe—but since those who went would have to pay for their tickets and spend an entire morning with Q., we opted out.)

Again, if you want to see an Olympic event, don't wait until the closing weekend. Tickets certainly were there to be had, but the sports we thought we might want to see—basketball and gymnastics—were in the medal rounds, and seats weren't exactly affordable. After all, the gold for those medals had to come from somewhere. In the end, we decided that we weren't such big sports nuts, and we'd rather spend the money on a boat trip to a Greek island or something. More later about that.

Next we made our way to Omonoia Square, where I used a public phone to call the airline and see about changing our plane tickets. Again we struck out: the change fee was $200 a pop. (This confirmed what Sarah had heard from Qedem, who had tried to change their tickets earlier when they got to Greece and found themselves gigless.) So back to Athens Christian Center we went, where B. filled us in on the latest offer from Q.: On Monday, the group would travel to Thessaloniki for outreach events there. Holly and Logan would stay behind at the church, and Sarah and I could do the same. We accepted, because (a) we had no other place to stay and would rather drop $400 on a few more days in Athens than on changing our plane tickets; (b) we didn't believe Holly and her baby should be left alone, even if Q. thought it was a good idea.

Back to Vathis Square went the band that evening, but changes were already afoot. Holly, citing vocal fatigue, stayed behind, and so did Sarah, who was probably not anxious for another encounter with the pimp. Desiree, from U4ic, stepped in for Holly and sang some of our songs without missing a beat, which surprised me. She must have rehearsed with someone, but it didn't happen while I was around. Our keyboardist, Justin, arrived at Athens Christian Center from Seattle at about 6 p.m., after the band had gone to the gig. Q. had left instructions for him to go immediately to Vathis, but Justin, showing excellent judgment, declined. Most musicians wouldn't want to play a gig immediately after a 17-hour plane ride.

In terms of evangelism, this was the most intense night of the entire trip. Elias led some 30 people in a prayer of conversion, and the Qedem girls spent substantial time trying to help a woman who appeared to have consumed a few too many substances. The night's other excitement was supplied by a guest in a hotel near the square, who pitched a tomato from the balcony while Qedem was playing and struck a passing British tourist in the leg. This was the night I broke the tip off a 3-millimeter-thick mandolin pick, which might indicate where I was channeling some of my frustration. That's a very heavy pick, even by mandolinists' standards. I didn't know it was possible to break one. But once more, nothing was stolen, nothing (apart from my pick) was broken, and nobody got hurt.

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: The best transportation deal in Athens, hands down, is the 7-day Metro pass. For 10 euros you get a week's worth of unlimited rides on buses and Metro trains. The pass more than pays for itself if you ride twice a day, which all of us were doing. But Q., who was supposed to be covering transportation, insisted on buying single tickets (and if he wasn't with us, we sometimes got stuck paying our own way). Then he'd claim the tickets were good for three hours, which was a lie—they're good for only half of that.

Fare enforcement on the Metro was next to nonexistent. We met no fare inspectors any time we rode (except once—more later about that), and I was convinced that Athens was merely being lenient with the poor confused tourists trying to find the venue for rhythmic gymnastics. But does that make it OK to cheat the system? Perhaps flouting the anti-proselytization law was a legitimate act of civil disobedience, but not paying for public transit was quite another thing. Sarah and I bought one 7-day pass and supplemented it with single tickets when riding together, but I know some band members took Q. at his word and rode with expired tickets. On one hand, I'm glad none of us were caught, because I didn't want my bandmates to incur a fine or suffer embarrassment. On the other hand, I felt cheated. I was itching to see the look on Q.'s face when he got the comeuppance he so richly deserved.

I'm still itching.

22. Down from the Mountain

2006-02-10T17:34:00.000-08:00

You that way and you this, but two in company.
——Timon of Athens, V.i

When I think about the events of the weekend of August 28–29 in Athens, I think about a scene near the end of the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird. The Finch kids, Scout and Jem, are getting ready to walk home from the school pageant. Scout is still wearing her ham costume. As they step out of the schoolhouse, the narrator delivers an innocent yet foreboding line: "Thus began our longest journey together."

In terms of distance, of course, the journey is no longer than any other time Scout and Jem have walked back from school — but this time they're brutally attacked by a knife-wielding redneck and then rescued by the mysterious Boo Radley — who sticks that knife right where it belongs, thank you very much.

Just in case you're wondering, the redneck in my story has no knife. That's the good news. The bad news is that Boo Radley never shows up.

After Friday's gig I concluded that the worst was over. I thought I'd just try to keep out of Q.'s way and make the most of my final weekend with the band. We hadn't quite been playing up to the standard set by our performance at Monday's showcase, but I hoped we could work on that, now that the distractions were behind us.

For his part, Q. had gone all day Friday without pulling any idiotic stunts (or, at least, any new ones), and actually seemed a little happier than he had on Thursday. We had an interesting-sounding gig coming up on Sunday: the "end game party" at Cosmovision Center, which would coincide with the closing ceremony of the Olympics. (I was a little disappointed to realize we weren't actually playing at the closing ceremony, which was the impression I'd gotten from Q. before we came to Athens, but I was long past worrying about such things.)

On Saturday, Q. and most of the group got up early and went to their Olympic event, leaving me and Sarah to our own devices — which consisted of another visit to the Acropolis, this time with Holly and Logan. Like all days thus far, it was beautiful and sunny, and we started off early enough to avoid the afternoon heat.

Thus began our longest journey together.

At the visitors' entrance, someone handed me a flyer denouncing the impending trip by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to the closing ceremony. Because of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, Powell's presence would amount to a "provocation," the flyer said. I didn't know it at the time, but there'd been quite the demonstration about this the night before. The guys distributing flyers were members of the Greek Communist Party, and they'd also hung a "Powell Go Home" banner over the side of the Acropolis. Later I would learn that the tactic worked — Secretary Powell, citing a busy schedule, canceled his Athens trip.

Gee, I wonder if I could have paid the Communists to display a "Q. Go Home" banner?

You haven't been to the Acropolis until you've gone there with a 7-month-old. Holly left Logan's stroller at the baggage-check room and carried him all the way up and down the Acropolis in a front pack. He loved it, and I don't remember him crying until just before we reached the base of the hill at the end of our visit. Logan's favorite part of the Acropolis was the dirt. We parked him in front of the Erechthion to take a photo, and he immediately scooped up a handful of fine powdery earth and slapped it in his mouth, as 7-month-olds will. I had to laugh. I'm sure there was a good deal of marble dust in that dirt, which could have been sloughed off the Parthenon any time in the past 2,500 years. Not to mention other sources of dust. As the Bard put it:

Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!*

Or, indeed, that it should end up in the mouths of babes.

Greeks, by the way, love babies. But they also have a cultural superstition about the "evil eye" which stipulates that you should pretend to despise the things you love so that the evil eye won't deprive you of them. Which means that when Greeks see a baby, they spit on it — or at least pretend to. Holly was quite concerned the first time this happened to Logan, but she got used to it. Sort of. I was all for putting a coin cup on his stroller and charging people 50 cents for the privilege.

On the way back, we retraced the route we'd taken with Desiree, even stopping at the same Cretan café for lunch. Holly told us about a possible afternoon gig, for which she'd gotten some sketchy details from Q. YWAM and some of the other ministries working at the Olympics were hosting a "24 hours of worship" event and had invited Loudmouth to play. It sounded exciting, both for the social aspect of meeting other ministry teams (especially now that Youth in Action and the French King's Kids had left Athens) and for participating in worship with them.

So back to Athens Christian Center we went, to await instructions from Q. Our final Vathis Square outreach was scheduled for that evening, and as time passed I began to wonder how we would manage to play both YWAM and Vathis. I was still wondering this at around 5 p.m. as I walked to the corner grocery to get something to drink (thanks to the heat, this was our number-one leisure activity in Athens).

When I got back, Holly had the answer. Wanna guess what it was?

I don't think Q. was even on the premises at the time, but he somehow got hold of Holly via phone and gave her our marching orders. She and I, with Logan and Sarah in tow, were to take the Metro to the Ethniki Amyna station and then catch a city bus to the YWAM gig, which was in a conference center on the edge of town. We would perform there as a duo. Q. had expressed his belief that the bus ride would be "relaxing for the baby." The rest of the band would play Vathis Square, with Desiree and Justin replacing me and Holly. We were supposed to leave in one hour.

During this phone conversation, Q. also spoke to Sarah. He told her that he'd committed the band to the YWAM gig before we left Seattle. Which seems like an odd card to play in that situation, because it meant that Q. had no excuse for either the late notice or sending only part of the band. (Then again, Q. apparently didn't think he needed an excuse for anything.)

I had mixed feelings, but chief among them was anger. I was upset about missing Vathis Square because (a) I had very few band gigs left; and (b) differences with Q. aside, I wanted to support Elias' outreach work. On the other hand, I felt some relief: those concerts were exhausting.

What really had me cheesed, though, was the instruction to play a duo gig without prior notice or the opportunity to rehearse. Loudmouth material wouldn't work in that format unless it was severely rearranged — an operation for which we had no time. You may recall that I’d already tried to play unrehearsed sets in Monastiraki Square and at Koridallos, and the experiences were less than encouraging. I don't mind being a little sloppy or unprepared if I'm just playing for fun, but if I'm going out representing the Creator of the universe, I prefer to have my stuff together.

But I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. Q. didn't think the full band needed rehearsal, so if he broke a piece off of it, why should that piece need to rehearse? Later Q. allegedly said that he'd always intended for Loudmouth to be a modular band. If so, he'd been remarkably silent about those intentions up till now. I was all for telling him to stick the duo gig where the moon didn't shine, but fortunately Holly settled me down.

To be completely fair, I should acknowledge Q.'s apparent confidence in me and Holly. I'm sure he wouldn't have asked us to pull a gig out of our sleeves if he didn't think we could handle it. And handle it we did. We decided to play some standard worship songs from charts Holly had brought, which as a worship leader she was comfortable doing. I'd back her up on mandolin, which I'm comfortable doing as long as there's a chart. Knowing a little better than Q. what was and wasn't "relaxing for the baby," Holly left Logan behind with Sarah, the designated babysitter, and the two of us sallied forth to the Metro station.

The trip took over an hour, and because I no longer trusted Q., I didn't fully trust the directions he'd given us. But the bus driver seemed to recognize the name of the convention center when I asked him about it, and eventually he deposited us there — a huge building on the outskirts of Athens that looked like nothing so much as an abandoned warehouse. We worked our way around the side until we found a door that someone answered.

What followed was a welcome respite from our tribulations. The place was packed with missionaries from around the world, all of whom were welcoming and encouraging. About 80 people were sitting near the stage, with plenty of others milling around in back. There were even a few familiar faces. Russ Rosen's band had played just before us, and I spotted Steve, the pastor from St. Andrew's, in the crowd. Pandora showed up later, after Holly and I played. We even met a friend of Holly's from high school, and she introduced us to a djembe player from Ghana named Benji, who sat in with us on our set. We figured that if we were going to wing it, the more the merrier. Benji knew all the songs Holly had chosen, and he did a great job. Because this was a worship service and not a concert, everyone sang along — and perhaps I was able to get my perfectionist side to take a back seat for once. No one was going to know if I missed a chord change or two. People were singing to God and I was helping them, and for a while all was right with the world. I was sorry Sarah hadn't come, and we would have stayed longer if Holly hadn't needed to get back and see her son.

In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn't have worried so much about having to wing it. Holly and Benji achieved a nice open groove that was suitable for me to improvise some mandolin parts, which is what I do with my own worship band in church all the time. The format was small and simple enough that I didn't have to worry about stepping on anyone's toes, musically speaking. I'll admit that Q. was correct in his belief that Holly and I could handle this gig, as long as you let me maintain that his way of notifying us left a lot to be desired.

Allow me to back up for a second. Before we played, we spent a few minutes talking with Johnathan Macris of Hellenic Ministries, which was hosting the other missionaries staying at the convention center. Johnathan had booked us, but he wasn't happy about the experience, and he took the time to make a few choice observations about Q. It was an illuminating conversation — our first real hint that Q. was earning himself a bad reputation with people outside the band as well as in it. For one thing, Johnathan had been promised a full band and gotten only a duo. For a second thing, I gather Q. had waffled a good deal on what time he'd be sending us. For a third thing, Johnathan had been playing phone tag with Q. for days. Which leads us to...

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: Q. did not bring a mobile phone to Greece, nor did he rent one while he was there. Why? Well, he said, in Salt Lake City he'd spent all his time on the phone, working on bookings. In Athens he wanted to be available to his band members. In other words, Q. wanted to neglect his primary responsibility (handling booking logistics) and spend more time on an endeavor for which he had absolutely no aptitude (building camaraderie within the band, at which he failed miserably — whatever camaraderie we had was achieved mostly when Q. was out of the room).

Of course, not having a phone doesn't obviate the need to make or receive phone calls. It just makes it harder to do so (besides making you look completely unprofessional). When he needed a phone, Q. used either Christian's mobile phone or the office phone at Athens Christian Center, whichever was available. This essentially turned the owners of those phones into his answering service, which they didn't appreciate — and forced them to pay for his calls, which they appreciated even less. Johnathan had tried to reach Q. at the church office for days, but Q. either hadn't gotten the messages or hadn't bothered to return them.

In addition, not having a phone did little to make Q. more accessible to band members. This, after all, was the same guy who ended our only band meeting after five minutes, and then made B. his emissary instead of talking with me directly. He could hide from us when he felt like it, and we couldn't even reach him by phone. Still, he was around just enough to make my life miserable, and he was just inaccessible enough to people like Johnathan to make their lives miserable.

Anyhow, I didn't buy Q.'s rationale for not having a phone. I have a much simpler explanation: He was too cheap. Any questions?

*Hamlet, V.i.

23. Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

2006-02-10T17:33:00.000-08:00

Wilt thou be lord of the whole world? That's twice.
——Antony and Cleopatra, II.vii

If you're doing business with a religious son of a bitch, get it in writing.
——William S. Burroughs

The previous entry ends on something of a high note, as a potential disaster turned into a positive experience for me and Holly. (Too bad the rest of the band wasn't there.) Knowing we had to play Sunday morning, everyone went to bed as soon as possible after returning from our respective concerts.

When we got up, Holly had perplexing news. Q. was sending us out as a duo again. Apparently his impossible-shots, last-minute booking style was catching up with him. Later I learned that we were actually triple-booked that morning. B. and Ben Dally handled one gig by themselves. What was left of LoudmoU4ic (distinctions between the two bands being hopelessly blurred by this time) played the second; the dynamic duo of Holly and Martin were sent to cover the third. In addition, Ken went and gave a talk someplace, no music involved.

Ours was, I believe, Loudmouth's original Sunday morning booking, the others having been added later. We were playing at a small evangelical church in north Athens, where Michalis (our contact at Logos Music) was the worship leader. Though miffed again about not playing with the full band, I looked forward to the duo gig, since Saturday night had turned out so well.

This time Logan and Sarah came along for the ride. There was nothing to eat at Athens Christian Center and no opportunity to get breakfast elsewhere, Sunday morning being the one time of the week when many eating establishments in Athens are closed. We took the Metro to the Maroussi station and then followed a map Michalis had drawn. It lacked a few crucial details, such as which way to turn when we left the station. But after a week and a half in Greece I had picked up the alphabet and could read street signs phonetically. When I realized we were going the wrong way, we retraced our steps and got directions from a policeman.

Until we found the church I had no clear idea what Michalis looked like, but when we met him I recognized the handsome, intense-looking guy in his late 20s who'd been watching our gig a week ago at Koridallos. We were late, but Michalis wasn't concerned about that. He was concerned that the rest of the band wasn't there.

Holly and I did play a couple of songs by ourselves during the church service, but mostly we sat in with Michalis' worship band (Michalis on keys; guitar, bass, and drums; us). The sermon was in Greek, so when it began we repaired to the foyer. To amuse Logan, I carried him over to the foosball table and started fooling around with the ball, at which he emitted a genuine, full-fledged belly laugh. Holly was impressed. "Usually only his brother can get him to do that," she observed. People have always told me I'm good with kids. I was starting to believe it.

Hunger had become an issue, and the cafés were open at last, so I went to grab some sandwiches. When I returned, the service was out, and Holly and Michalis were engaged in a serious-looking conversation.

Michalis, it turned out, shared many of Johnathan's concerns. He'd been trying to work with Q. since before Loudmouth came to Athens, and he was finally fed up with the broken promises. You'll recall that Q. had talked about bringing Switchblade to Athens. Well, Michalis had promoted those Switchblade gigs — reserving venues, distributing posters, and ordering CDs to sell — and he was left high and dry when Switchblade pulled out. More later about that.

Now Michalis was worried about the evening's Loudmouth performance at Cosmovision Center. He'd booked it weeks if not months ago — it was, after all, printed on the CDs we'd been handing out. But he had cause to doubt Q.'s goodwill. In fact, Q. had mentioned something to Holly about another outreach with Elias that night — which would make three consecutive gigs where he'd deliberately double-booked the band.

Michalis is a take-charge guy, and he came up with a plan to force Q.'s hand. Holly and I gave our instruments and gear to a female associate of his, who drove them over to Cosmovision Center. This ensured that the dynamic duo, if not the full band, would have to come back and play there. Meanwhile Michalis packed the four of us into his compact car and drove to Athens Christian Center, where he intended to have a few words with Q.

Unlike Q., Michalis had a cellular phone, and he spent a good deal of the drive talking on it, mostly in Greek. I'm not sure who he was talking to — either George, his colleague at Logos Music, or possibly Philemon, to sort out what was going on with that night's outreach.

Q. and Ken were not happy to see Michalis. The three of them found a table in the courtyard and held a heated discussion for half an hour. I wanted to listen in, but Michalis appeared to be holding his own, and I figured my presence would just antagonize Q. So I kept my distance. Toward the end of the conversation, Michalis produced a blank piece of paper and asked Q. to write the names of the band members he was sending to Cosmovision Center. Q., if I'm not mistaken, wrote the names of the entire band and signed the paper.

So he'd finally put something in writing. Of course it meant nothing — I had tons of e-mail from him and E., which is a form of writing, and it might as well have been written on a bathroom wall. In disappearing ink.

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: Holly was seven months postpartum from the birth of Logan, her second child. She'd been doing Pilates to get back in shape, and she looked, if I may say so, pretty darn healthy. (Sarah agrees with me on this.) Yet, she told Sarah, Q. was constantly telling her to lose weight so the band could succeed in Christian music. Three observations:

I thought Christian music was supposed to be about Christianity, not about appearances. If Holly wasn't thin enough for Christian music, then Christian music was fostering body image problems in its female fans.
If anyone in the band needed to lose weight, it was me, but I never heard a word from Q. about it.
Instructions to lose weight are hard to take seriously when they come from someone who appears to weigh around 300 pounds.

24. Puppet Strings

2006-02-10T17:32:00.000-08:00

O weary night, O long and tedious night,
Abate thy hour! Shine comforts from the east,
That I may back to Athens by daylight,
From these that my poor company detest.
——A Midsummer Night's Dream, III.ii

Sarah and I were getting pretty tight with Holly. We'd hardly seen the other band members since Friday night, but we were having fun getting acquainted and helping her care for the baby. We had grown to respect Holly's musicianship and integrity, to say nothing of her grace and patience: this was the third time she'd traveled somewhere with Q. Each time he'd promised her that things would go better, only to renege.

The three of us had something else in common, and we didn't realize it yet: We were the only group members standing up to Q. The others, although no less disgruntled than we, kept their heads down and didn't make waves. And now we, the problem children, were split off from the group and on our own. Give Q. some credit: Marginalizing us was a shrewd strategy — possibly the only intelligent move he made on the whole trip.

At the moment, however, we didn't feel marginalized. We felt victorious as we climbed back into Michalis' car. The plan, as I understood it, was for Q. to send the rest of the band after us to Cosmovision Center. We'd play the first slot in the "closing night celebration" there. Then Michalis had arranged for a van and driver to take us from Koropi to Piraeus, a 13-mile trip, in time for the next gig.

Cosmovision turned out to be a sort of conference center/sports complex. A huge outdoor stage awaited us, with a professional sound system like the one we'd used at the showcase gig. There were some dormitory buildings, a soccer field, and an air-conditioned meeting hall/common room where we plopped into some comfy chairs, had something cool to drink, and had a chat with George, Michalis' colleague. I think George had been curious to see just what sort of people hung out with Q., and was a little surprised to learn that we had neither horns nor tails.

"I've never met this Q.," said George, "but he must be an interesting guy." Ah, the all-purpose euphemism: "interesting." It's the wrong word, of course. By this time I couldn't have been less interested in anything Q. did. We reassured George that we were also unhappy with Q., which was about all we could do for him. Still, it felt good to have another ally.

George's cell phone rang, and as far as I know he spent the rest of the afternoon talking on it. Michalis seemed to be making or taking a lot of calls, too. More people started to trickle in — including, once again, Russ Rosen and his band, along with his wife, Sandy, and her Raw Motion dance team. Floks, the most prominent if not the only CCM band in Greece, also arrived. I kept waiting for the rest of Loudmouth to show up; Cosmovision was a very nice facility and I felt guilty that we were the only ones there to enjoy it. Sarah and Sandy talked for a while; I went outside and attempted to play soccer for a few minutes; I don't know what Holly was doing. I can account for the way I spend time, but not for the way I kill it. The final few Olympic events were playing on the big-screen TV, and a crowd slowly gathered around it to watch. It was our last chance.

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: At some point Michalis finished his phone calls and gathered us for an announcement. Ready for this? His signature on a piece of paper notwithstanding, Q. had changed his mind. He would not send the rest of the band out to Cosmovision. Not only that, he wouldn't even allow me and Holly to play our set, because he, Q., owned the rights to the name Loudmouth Worshippers. We were to leave and rejoin the band down in Piraeus. Or so he had just finished telling Michalis.

So this was how Q. treated people who tried to hold him accountable for his promises. Mere puppet strings weren't good enough for him; he wanted us to be remote-control puppets. I think I said earlier that my opinion of him had already hit bottom. Well, guess what? Sometimes there's another bottom below the first one. Even Holly — who until this point had complied with Q.'s every instruction, no matter how ridiculous or unfair — seemed to be wavering on whether or not to play. I think it was Michalis who proposed the simple-but-brilliant solution: We just wouldn't use the name Loudmouth Worshippers. We'd go on as Holly and Martin, play worship songs as we'd done the night before, and then leave for Piraeus.

And that, dear reader, is what we did. The audience — more mission and outreach workers, gathering to celebrate at the end of their trips — were still coming in as we started. Russ Rosen's drummer and bassist joined us, and we had a rockin' little quartet. The drummer even complied with my request to keep it simple and let me handle fills on the mandolin. Afterward we thanked everyone and jumped in the van.

Piraeus, our next destination, is not just the southern terminus of the Athens Metro; it's a port on the Aegean Sea that has been closely tied to the Athens economy since ancient times. During the Golden Age of Greece, not only were Athens and Piraeus both walled cities, there were also walls around the road connecting them, to help protect goods moving from the port to the capital. Piraeus is worth the trip if you want to visit, but here's a bit of advice: Don't try to drive there from Koropi during the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games.

I've forgotten the name of our driver, but he was a patient fellow. I was shocked to learn later that this was only a 13-mile journey (although that's as the crow flies, since crows are smart enough not to use the Greek highway system). It took forever. And whereas I began the trip on a bit of an emotional high (from the satisfaction of a good performance, fellowship with other believers, and the slightly illicit thrill of having defied Q.'s orders), my energy slowly ebbed away as the van inched through the nightmare traffic and a tired Logan wailed out his dissatisfaction. By the time we got to Piraeus, ten days' worth of sleep deprivation had finally done their dread work. I was more bone-achingly, mind-numbingly exhausted than I'd been at any other time on the trip. And it took a couple of cell-phone calls and another half hour of driving around before we finally found the spot where the band was setting up to play. I gathered my strength, collected my instruments and stands from the van, and carried them to the stage.

Then I heard Ken call my name.

25. Pants on Fire

2006-02-10T17:31:00.000-08:00

These are not natural events; they strengthen
From strange to stranger.
——The Tempest, V.i

you don't care about true
you don't care about false
you just want everyone to agree with you, that's all
——Tonio K.

"Q. wants to talk to you and Holly," said Ken, just as I slung the last of my instruments onto the back corner of the stage. The gig was another outreach event with Elias, and the stage was set up in a public park near an outdoor café, where diners were watching the Olympic closing ceremonies on a giant TV screen. I bet they hadn't bargained on preaching and live music to go with their sports spectacle. The rest of the Loudmouth Worshippers were tuning guitars, checking mics, and getting ready to go on. We'd arrived just in time.

Naturally I thought Q.'s request for a talk showed lousy timing. A lightning-fast setup for me would still take at least 10 minutes, what with three instruments to tune and plug in. This was no time for a chat. It was my last gig with Loudmouth, the end of my sojourn. I'd just endured a nerve-wracking drive from Koropi, and all I wanted was to rejoin my bandmates for one last hurrah. So I said to Ken, "I need to get set up here."

"Q. wants to see Sarah and both of you right now," Ken repeated. Suddenly Barbie materialized and offered to take Logan while Holly and Sarah joined in the urgent talk with Q. Seeing that I had no choice, I left my gear on the stage and the three of us followed Ken.

Q. was sitting on a park bench beneath some trees, about thirty or forty yards behind the stage. Hoping for a brief conversation, Sarah and I parked ourselves on an adjoining bench. Holly sat across from us, and Ken sat next to Q.

What ensued is worth reporting in its entirety. I've forgotten some of it, hence the awkward gaps. But here in its surreal, paraphrased glory is what I can remember. A fair amount of "what I should have said" comes into play here. Perhaps I could have acquitted myself better in other circumstances.

Q.: What are you doing here?

Or words to that effect. I remember this opening question catching me completely off guard. We'd been instructed to come to Piraeus, and here we were. Why should Q. be surprised to see us?

Me: Well, we just got in and we're looking forward to playing with the band.

Q.: I understand the two of you don't want to work with me again. Is that true?

Brilliant deduction, Sherlock!

Holly: We already discussed that, Q. I've already told you I won't continue with Loudmouth after this trip.

Ah, so she'd handed in her notice. I hadn't officially done so, but did Q. really think there was a chance I'd come back for more abuse? I was starting to realize, though, that this wouldn't be just a brief pre-concert confab.

Me: I have made that decision, yes.

Q. made a dismissive motion with his arm, like a baseball umpire calling out a runner.

Q.: You're gone, both of you. I'll find you a hotel or something for tonight and then you're on your own. I don't even want you talking to anyone in this group.

Gasps and cries of shock and alarm from Holly, Martin, and Sarah. Did Q. intend to deprive of us of our shelter at Athens Christian Center, where we planned to spend the next week while the rest of the group went to Thessaloniki? It certainly sounded that way. What kind of creep throws a mother and her baby out on the street in a foreign city, just because she says she doesn't want to work with him again?

Q.: I've been on the phone all day getting cussed out in English and Greek because of you two.

Um, we weren't the ones who tried to renege on your agreements. And if it was in Greek, how would you know you were being cussed out?

Q.: I've had Philemon trying to sort this out with Michalis and George, and they called me names and accused me of all sorts of stuff.

Ah, so that's what those phone calls were about back at Cosmovision Center. And Philemon was translating — even though Michalis and George both spoke perfect English. It made sense, though, given Q.'s penchant for using intermediaries (B., for instance) to talk to people he was afraid of (me, for instance). But, of course, translation increases the chance of miscommunication.

And was Q. implying that we had put George and Michalis up to it? Didn't they have their own reasons for being angry with him? I hadn't gone into any detail with Michalis or George; I'd just observed that Q. wasn't in the habit of keeping his promises.

Me: Well, you haven't exactly treated Michalis very well. Why did you book this gig with Elias on top of the one you'd already booked with Michalis?

Q.: I support Elias and he supports me, so when he wanted to do this outreach I told him yes. Elias is totally focused on ministry, and he put a lot into making this happen at the last minute. So if I have a chance to help him, you bet I'm going to tell Michalis to take a hike.

Oh, so Q. didn't care if he broke his word to Michalis, as long as it was for the sake of "ministry."

Ken: You need to understand, Michalis is a bad guy. He's only interested in money.

Funny, prior to the trip E. said Michalis had a "genuine heart for ministry." Of course, that was before Q. decided to screw him over. I think Michalis was interested in getting back the money he'd been cheated out of, but that doesn't mean it's all he cared about.

Q.: What do you have to say for yourselves?

Sarah: Q., when you say you don't think you're a leader, you're right. Other people in this group might have leadership skills; you should let them lead. That's what a leader would do.

Me: There's only one Loudmouth in this group, and it's you.

THAT was a good line!

Me: You've lied to us the whole trip.

Q.: Give me an example. When did I lie?

This was my golden opportunity to really rip Q. apart. But I blew it.

First, I was flabbergasted that such a blatant liar would even try to make a show of innocence. But I guess that's part of what makes him such a blatant liar.

Next, I didn't want to start with things like Olympic venues, corporate sponsors, huge crowds, shared billings with Switchblade et al., Sarah's plane fare, TV interviews, or Olympic event tickets — because I didn't want Q. to think I had come to Athens for those things. To me, the simple act of breaking a promise is a far greater crime than the loss of the thing promised. But I was sure Q. wouldn't understand this.

Furthermore, loud Greek preaching from the stage was now blasting around our ears, and I was so exhausted I could barely stay awake. Many of the broken promises had gone clean out of my head at the moment. So the only lie I managed to mention was:

Me: The other day when I asked you where E., Ken, and Barbie were, you said they were running errands. That was a lie; they were watching an Olympic event.

Probably the simplest and most straightforward of Q.'s lies that I knew about, but it was all I had the capacity for at this point. To my surprise, Q. crumpled up like a discarded paper bag.

Q. (sheepishly): Yes, those were all the tickets I had, and I just didn't want to explain it, so I lied. I'm sorry.

And that was the first and last time he ever apologized to me for anything.

Sarah: Q., you lied the other night when you said you hadn't been talking in the hall. We heard you out there.

We should've quit while we were ahead. Yes, Q. had been talking in the hall, but he'd stopped and gone into his room a good 20–30 minutes before my big outburst.

Q: That wasn't me, I was in my room.

At this point an argument ensued between Q., Ken, and Sarah, with Ken taking Q.'s side. Q. quickly reinflated himself and reminded Sarah that he'd stuck up for me on that night. Not wishing to dwell on an episode where my own behavior had been less than stellar, I cut in.

Me: Sarah, drop it. This isn't getting us anywhere.

And now for Today's Pearl of Wisdom, although just about anything Q. said during this conversation could qualify. A minute ago the guy had asked for examples of his own lies, and now here he was, spitting out a fresh one. Maybe he'd been lying for so long he'd started to deceive even himself:

Q.: I care about the well-being of everyone on this trip —

Me (laughing maniacally): Is that why you haven't fed us for a week? That's a good one.

Naturally, Q. and Ken here held forth about the lunch supplies they'd bought. I won't bore you with further complaints about the inadequacy of said supplies, or about the total absence of dinner. Back on the stage, the preaching finished and the band began to play.

Me: Great. They've started without us.

Q.: What do you care? After what you said about me, do you really think I'm going to give you a mic? Are you crazy?

Apparently it was OK for Q. to falsely insinuate that I incited Michalis to curse at him, but not OK for me to justly accuse him of lying. Whatever.

I considered reminding Q. that he'd never once given me a mic in Greece. My job was to play, not to talk, and I was plugging all my instruments in, not using a microphone. Apparently Q. still didn't know the difference. In my head, I rehearsed the line "I don't need a mic, I just want to play." It sounded pathetic. So I rolled my eyes and said nothing.

Q.: I want you to —

Me: Well, I won't say what I want you to do, Q.

Several vulgarities had occurred to me in the previous split second, but I censored myself in service of the Christian ideal of temperate speech. However, if Michalis and George really had cussed Q. out, he'd certainly given them ample provocation.

Holly: Q., wait a minute. I'm sorry if I said anything about you to Michalis I shouldn't have.

Here Holly proceeded to apologize to Q. for a couple of minutes, although she did a pretty good job of maintaining her dignity while doing so. Meanwhile I felt my brain slip a few more notches toward total exhaustion. After a while Holly reached what Q. appeared to regard as a sufficient level of supplication.

Q.: All right, then. You can get up on stage. (To me) What about you?

So that was the game. The jerk expected me to get down on my knees and beg. Well, forget it. I wanted to play with the band, but not at the expense of my self-respect. Brown-nosing Q. was simply too high a price to pay. Furthermore, my introverted side had assumed control of my mind, as it does when I'm tired and stressed. I was completely shut down.

Me: I got nothing more to say.

Q.: Fine. (To Holly) You're in. (To me) You're out. You're not ministry-minded.

Me: And whose fault is that?

I took Q.'s statement to mean that I'd rather confront him about his deficiencies than participate in the outreach, and I could hardly deny that. But if I was distracted from ministry, it was Q. who had created the distractions.

One could justifiably accuse Q. himself of lacking a ministry mindset. Exhibit A would be the present discussion, which was all about Q.'s own reputation. (Witness his paranoid fear that I would try to denounce him from the stage.) But he didn't stick around long enough for me to point this out. He and Ken got up and walked away, leaving me and Sarah by ourselves on the bench.

Me: I'm sorry, honey. I was too tired to argue any more.

We moved to another bench closer to the stage and listened to the band for a few minutes. Justin, who for some reason wasn't playing, approached us. I didn't want him to get in trouble with Q., so I said, "Don't talk to me, man. I'm poison. Q. just gave me the heave-ho." Justin gave a knowing smile. Like B. and Holly, he was a veteran of these trips. He knew the score.

While pondering my next move, I decided to retrieve my instruments. As I approached the stage, Ken suddenly materialized beside me. "What are you doing?" he said.

"I'm getting my stuff off your precious stage," I snapped.

At this he backed off. I walked to the sidewalk, put down my gear, and stood there beside Sarah. She was weeping; I was in a daze, not sure what to do next. Philemon approached me and asked why I wasn't playing. He was shocked at my explanation. "Let me know if I can help you," he said, and went to talk to Elias.

Q. was nowhere to be seen, and he probably wasn't concerning himself with what might happen to us next. If he really was looking for a hotel to dump us in, he'd certainly set himself an arduous task on the last night of the Olympics. Nonetheless, we decided not to stick around long enough for him to succeed. We still had our suitcases and my dead rack gear back at Athens Christian Center, and we certainly weren't going to entrust them to Q.'s care while we languished in Piraeus. The thing to do was to find a way up to Athens immediately. Maybe Philemon could help us.

The next person to approach me was Elias, who patted me on the back and whispered in my ear, "Give me your card" — which was more English than I was accustomed to hearing him use. Good to know that he didn't need Q. to tell him what to think of me. So I got a card out of my violin case and gave it to him.

At my next opportunity I accosted Philemon and asked him how I could get back to Athens. It turned out that we were mere blocks away from the Piraeus Metro station, and the trains were still running (it must have been around 10 p.m. by this time). So I picked up my bags for the last time and squared my shoulders. And, like Orpheus and Eurydice departing the underworld, Sarah and I left Loudmouth Worshippers behind.

26. The Tribe Has Spoken

2006-02-10T17:30:00.000-08:00

When they next wake, all this derision
Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision,
And back to Athens shall the lovers wend.
——A Midsummer Night's Dream, III.ii

A man in my position should have had mixed feelings.

Anger at Q. for behaving like a playground bully. Confusion over exactly what he thought I had said or done. Wistfulness over missing the last band gig. Satisfaction that I hadn't missed more band gigs. A strange relief that our situation had been stripped of its ambiguity. Excitement that we'd soon be out from under Q.'s thumb. Anxiety over what might happen the rest of the night. Concern and a wee bit of betrayal at Holly's capitulation to Q. Pride in having stood my ground and told Q. what I thought of him. Frustration over not taking charge of the conversation and really sticking it to Q. Gratitude to Sarah for her support, and to God for our continued survival and safety.

But I didn't feel any of those things as I set my bags on the floor of a Metro train and we settled in for the ride to Thissio Square. The only feeling I remember is absolute, complete, utter, bone-numbing exhaustion. If Sarah and I said anything to each other on the train, I couldn't tell you what it was. We just sat and tried to gather energy for the walk from Thissio to Athens Christian Center.

Our mission, should we choose to accept it, was to get inside the church before Q. returned. If we succeeded, I didn't intend to leave the building again, unless it was in handcuffs or on a stretcher, until Q. went to Thessaloniki the next day. If we failed ... well, there were several abandoned buildings in the neighborhood. A family of Gypsies were squatting in one, next to the church. We'd been giving stuff to their kids all week (extra food, T-shirts, towels, spare change). Maybe we could become their new neighbors.

I knew our chances weren't good. Our only hope was that Gilbert or some other group member had stayed behind, or that Haris was working late for some reason. It was around 11 p.m. when we finally reached the courtyard gate and I started banging on it. Nothing happened. We shouted and banged some more. I walked over to the church sanctuary and tried to rattle the heavy iron rolling gate that covered the front door. No response.

So we found a relatively clean spot on the sidewalk near the church building and sat down. (Athens got shiny new sidewalks for the Olympics, but the urban renewal never spread as far as Leonidou Street.) A dog wandered by, sniffed us, and kept moving. Someone looked down curiously from an upper balcony on the apartment building opposite the church, but otherwise the street was deserted. There we sat, talking, praying, singing a little, and trying to stay awake.

Our sidewalk vigil at least allowed us to recover from the shock of the encounter with Q. We began to process what had happened to us, and to experience some of the mixed feelings I catalogued earlier. We read Sarah's Bible by flashlight. We felt a bit like Paul and Silas in the Philippi jail, only we were locked out instead of in. Midnight came and went; there was no earthquake.

I had to admit that Q. held most of the cards now. As much as I didn't want to give him an undeserved apology, it might be the only way of getting inside. But every 20 minutes or so, I got up to stretch my legs and gave the courtyard gate another bang, just in case.

After more than two hours of this I looked through the gap by the gate's hinge for the umpteenth time, and saw to my astonishment that a light was on in the church building where no light had been earlier. A miracle! Sarah and I both pounded on the gate and yelled at the top of our lungs, and who should come and unlock it but...

Pandora, the deposed chef. She'd been asleep and then taking a shower, but she'd finally heard us. We rushed inside and made straight for our conjugal room, explaining to Pandora as we went.

Not knowing how much time we had, we quickly packed our suitcases and gathered our stuff in a corner of the room, against the possibility of a forceful eviction. We left our sleeping bags out, although we stayed fully dressed. Meanwhile we continued talking with Pandora, who prayed with us and vowed (a) not to tell anyone we were there; (b) to raise hell if Q. tried anything. We were still chatting when, after about 10 minutes, the gate opened and the rest of the group entered the courtyard. Sarah and I shut the door to our room, turned off the light, and jumped into our sleeping bags.

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: E. was the first person through the gate, and she heard Pandora's voice before she entered the building (Pandora being blessed with præternatural volume and projection), although she didn't hear us. We lay in the dark and listened as E. upbraided Pandora for violating quiet hours, even though (a) this was the first time she or Q. had ever breathed a word about nighttime quiet hours — the ones they established after my outburst were only in the morning; (b) as far as E. knew at the time, Pandora had been the only person at the church, so just whom was she supposed to be disturbing?

Eventually both E. and Pandora calmed down, and I lay still in my sleeping bag, trying to psych myself up for what might happen next. Since the group's return, my mixed feelings had begun to unmix themselves, leaving anger and anxiety at the forefront. It had been 17 years since my last violent altercation with anyone. But if Q. wanted a fist fight, I was ready to give it to him, although I didn't want to throw the first punch. We were both out of shape; he was a lot bigger than me, but I was pretty sure I had better reflexes. I didn't tell Sarah, but there was one other object in the room I hadn't packed: one of my instrument stands, which was constructed of heavy-duty steel and would be suitable for whacking an attacker on the noggin, should it come to that. (Of course, leaving the stand out was premeditation, which could mean first-degree assault if I ended up using it ... unless it was clearly in self-defense ... but I wasn't really thinking that far in advance.) Fighting dirty (groin kick, eye gouge, biting) wasn't out of the question either.

I had no idea how the Greek police might see things. But I didn't care. That's how angry I was. I was not coming out of that room voluntarily.

With all this on my mind, I sweated in my sleeping bag in the dark, the night being too warm to sleep fully dressed. Nothing happened for several minutes. Then we heard E. coming back up the hall. She flung open the door to our room (both she and Q. must have been home sick from finishing school the day their classmates learned to knock before entering) and flipped on the light. "Oh, you are here," she said. She shut the door and left.

And that was it. I expected Q. to come charging up the hall next, but he never did. Apparently he'd wised up, or at least mellowed out. After about 15 minutes we decided it was safe to get undressed and go to sleep.

The next morning everyone else got up uncharacteristically early and made a lot of noise cleaning bathrooms and mopping floors. But Sarah and I stayed put until they finished. We'd had enough confrontation for one trip.

It wasn't quite the Warsaw ghetto, but we did feel like survivors when the group finally left and we stumbled out into the courtyard. In fact, the entire trip at this point felt like a particularly excruciating reality-TV show, except for two things:

Despite being kicked out of the band, we were starting to consider ourselves the winners — and I think we had a pretty strong case.
Unlike reality TV, this was real.

But hey, if anyone wants to make an "Apprentice"-style show about a manufactured worship band, I can recommend a band manager who will give you footage you won't soon forget.

27. Free at Last

2006-02-10T17:29:00.000-08:00

Beseech you, sir, be merry; you have cause,
So have we all, of joy; for our escape
Is much beyond our loss.
——The Tempest, II.i

The antagonist having departed the scene for the moment, I can pick up the pace of my narrative a bit. Here's how we spent the next three days in Athens.

Monday, August 30
In addition to the four of us renegades, Christian and Gilbert also stayed behind. They were scheduled to fly out of Athens before the group got back from Thessaloniki. Pandora, via her connections with other missionaries in town, got a bed at a YWAM house in north Athens. We helped her pack and sent her on her way.

As soon as Sarah and I came outside, Holly apologized to us for the previous night. Q. had promised to pay her for the trip; her husband was unemployed; she needed the money. So she'd kowtowed in hopes of collecting her check (although she never did). Having been ready, myself, to clobber Q. a few short hours ago, I was in no position to condemn Holly for giving him a soft answer. I didn't care to speculate about whose tactics were morally superior.

Next Haris stopped by, and we expressed our condolences for everything Q. had put him through. He seemed relieved to have the guest list down to a manageable level. He loaned us a couple of sets of keys to the gate and the building, imploring us to keep both locked while we were out, or the Gypsy kids next door might climb over the wall and steal stuff. He even offered us his house to me and Sarah, but having no wish to impose upon him further, we declined.

We had an ambitious agenda for the day: Go to the beach. A female acquaintance of Christian's was working as a staffer for the Games. She was staying at a beach resort, and she'd invited Christian to bring some friends and hang out as she packed up and got ready to leave. So, dear reader, while Q., E., and our former bandmates spent seven hours in a hot, cramped bus on the way to Thessaloniki, the five of us floated and frolicked in the Aegean Sea, and Logan stuffed his mouth with sand. If this wasn't exactly revenge, it felt just as good.

This was the day that Gilbert and Christian told us how Q. had sent them around town to beg for bookings before the band arrived. And I made sure to apologize to Christian for regarding him as "part of the problem" earlier in the trip. As a sound tech working on an unrealistic schedule with unfamiliar equipment labeled in a foreign language, he'd done quite well.

We returned to Athens via Omonoia Square, where we spotted Benji — the Ghanaian percussionist Holly and I had played with on Saturday — coming out of Starbucks, along with several other missionaries we'd met that night. Later that evening I returned to the Internet café and once again encountered Marc Price, the actor and NBC correspondent. "Hey," Marc said, "we wanted to do a segment on you and your bouzouki, but we lost your manager's phone number." I assured him this was for the best, since Q. had failed to note the absence of a bouzouki among the instruments I brought to Athens. "And," I said, "last night he kicked me out of the band because I wouldn't brown-nose him. So, heck, today I went to the beach." This exchange was low-key and nonchalant; I'm sure that anyone with Marc's experience in TV has seen people treated much worse than I was. But I do wish I'd thought of pitching my experience to him as a reality show.

Tuesday, August 31
Christian went to the airport and left for Italy. He later worked his way up through Slovenia and the Czech Republic to Poland, where he got an apartment and studied at the University of Krakow to get a certificate for teaching English as a foreign language. Then he moved back to California and started a rock band. Meanwhile, my fascination with small shiny objects continues unabated.

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: Q. was miles away and still screwing things up, as we learned when a couple of YWAM missionaries showed up looking for their generator.

Allow me to explain. Before I arrived in Athens, another YWAM team had been ensconced at Athens Christian Center, but after spending a few days with Q., they found another place to stay. Only they couldn't take all their equipment, so they left behind some foodstuffs (particularly a few jars of Skippy peanut butter brought from the States for a Europe-based YWAMmer) and a portable generator, intending to return for them later. After a few days Q. decided those items were at his disposal, so he took the generator and some of the food up to Hope Place and bestowed them on Elias. Now the rightful owners stood in the courtyard, asking what had become of their stuff. Fortunately Sarah sorted it out for them.

We made the traditional pilgrimage to the Mitropoleos Starbucks, where the staff were starting to treat us like regulars, and who should be there but Benji and his pals again. If you're a homesick American traveler overseas, just find the nearest Starbucks and wait there a while. Someone you know is bound to come in.

Back at Athens Christian Center, Gilbert was in considerable pain, with huge blisters on his feet from walking a good deal more than he was accustomed to in ill-fitting shoes. We spent most of the day looking for a wheelchair we could rent for him. You'd think this would be simple, what with the Paralympics starting in a couple of weeks. But we called both the Paralympic committee office and a local advocacy group for the disabled, and neither had any leads for us. We hiked downtown to a medical-supply shop we'd seen earlier. The owner spoke no English, but he did have enough French to explain to Sarah that he'd sell us a wheelchair but not rent it.

We tried to introduce Holly and Gilbert to Indian food, which wasn't a very successful venture, as neither of them cared for spicy cuisine. Indian food in Athens is quite different from what you typically get in the States (or, indeed, in Canada, Ireland, England, and France, the other countries where I've had Indian food). Makes me wonder what it's like in India.

Although I had no bouzouki, I had notions of buying a baglama. That's a tiny six-string "pocket bouzouki" with a sort of checkered past. In the 1930s Greece was ruled by a military dictatorship. There was at the time a large criminal underclass consisting mostly of immigrants and known by the term rebetes. They were associated with rebetika, a type of bluesy-sounding folk music with macho lyrics about smoking hash and killing cops. Sort of the gangsta rap of its day. Many rebetes favored the baglama for playing rebetika, because it was small enough to (a) carry undetected in a coat pocket on the way to an illegal underground club; (b) conceal in a jail cell, if they were unfortunate enough to be imprisoned — since the music was forbidden in prisons. (Long before rebetika, the baglama was used in early Eastern Orthodox churches to help the singers find their pitches.) I don't smoke hash, kill cops, or even listen to a lot of rebetika, but I did want to look for a good baglama, which I figured I could carry home in one of the instrument bags I already had. While I searched, everyone else went to the Athens botanical gardens and discovered that most of the plants were dead. So were most of the baglamas I found — the remotely affordable ones all seemed to be cheap tourist trash that wouldn't stay in tune for a minute. I did manage, however, to find a hotel for me and Sarah now that the Olympics were over.

That night Sarah and I took the Metro to visit Pandora at her YWAM house. Again she offered to let us stay there, but the accommodations were dormitory-style, and we were beginning to crave a little — er — privacy. So we declined again, and bade Pandora farewell.

Wednesday, September 1
Tiny bars and cafés dotted the streets around Athens Christian Center. They were seedy, but so was the neighborhood. In the evenings they'd fill up with locals drinking, smoking, eating, and talking very loudly. Sarah, Holly, and I had nursed an ambition to order a meal in one of these joints, but so far we'd chickened out and kept mostly to larger, touristy souvlaki palaces.

Today, though, we took a chance. Holly remembered a particular café that intrigued her, so I set out with her to find it. (Sarah and Logan were having a nap.) We picked our way through a pedestrian alley and soon were more or less lost. We didn't find the place Holly had in mind, but we found another and stepped inside.

It was rustic but clean. There were a few nice pieces of decorative glass on the wall, but no signage of any kind. The few rough tables and some interesting bottles behind the counter indicated that we were in a public house, but we couldn't tell whether it served food.

And it wasn't exactly easy to find out. Behind the counter stood the proprietor, who appeared to be in his late 20s. With very limited English, he introduced himself: his name was Aziz, he was an Iraqi Kurd, and he was grateful to America for kicking Saddam Hussein's behind. This came as a bit of a relief after our encounter with the Communists at the Acropolis, not to mention many of the hecklers at Monastiraki. Here at last was one person in Greece who was glad to see some Yanks. "Bush — thank you! America — no problem!" Aziz repeated. I had and continue to have grave misgivings about the Iraq war, but this clearly wasn't the place to bring them up.

Next Aziz tried to figure out what we were doing in his pub. "Birra?" he asked. We didn't know what this meant until he reached for a bottle. No, no, we said, so he poured us each a glass of water instead. We kept gesticulating until Aziz understood that we wanted food. He vanished into the kitchen and came out with something in a pan. Progress! We didn't really care what he gave us; we were having an adventure. (Rick Steves would be proud.) The next chore was to explain that we wanted our meal to go. Despite the language barrier, Aziz didn't seem flustered. His kindness never wavered, and he even invited us to come back and sleep upstairs if we needed a place to stay — the third offer of lodgings I had received in as many days.

The food we got from Aziz — cheese, tomatoes, spicy sausage, and spanakopita — was the best meal I had anywhere in Athens. It's a shame we didn't make it back there for more.

Having climbed Mars Hill and the Acropolis, we thought we should give Lykavittos Hill a try, being given to understand that we could take a trolley to the top for an unbeatable view. When we reached the base of the hill, we learned that the trolley departed from a point about a third of the way up. Hundreds of steep stairs separated us from that spot, and Holly declared that there was no way she could get Logan's stroller up them. We stopped to ponder our next move — only someone forgot to tell Gilbert, who kept going, bum leg, blisters and all. Before we knew it he was several flights above us.

Most people I know could learn a thing or two from Gilbert about determination. Apparently he intended to reach the top of Lykavittos if he had to do it alone. This was his last day in Athens, and if that was how he wanted to spend it, I was going to support him. I went up after him, leaving the women and child, who killed the next couple of hours resting, talking, and window-shopping.

Gilbert and I conquered the stairs, rode the trolley, and walked the rest of the way up the hill. At the observation area, we kicked back for a while and checked out the view, which was pretty spectacular. We tried the coin-op telescope, which didn't seem to work very well. Just when the timer ran out, we realized we'd been looking through it backwards. I hope that's not a metaphor for anything.

There's a former Orthodox monastery atop the hill, converted into a chapel, and apparently no one cares if you wear shorts inside. So in we went.

Not long ago the Greek Orthodox Church released a list of professions from which they'd consider candidates for the clergy, as well as a list of professions they found unsuitable. The latter list includes soldiers (which strikes me as terribly unfair in a country that requires men to serve in the military) and politicians. I find both of these restrictions ridiculous, given that (a) among his disciples, Jesus called a government worker and a radical politician; (b) St. George and St. Demetrios, two of the most popular saints in Greece, are usually depicted as soldiers in Orthodox iconography. Speaking of which, the chapel's walls and ceiling were covered with icons, and after our eyes adjusted to the dark, I spent about half an hour deciphering them for Gilbert, in which effort my newfound knowledge of the Greek alphabet proved quite useful.

Two professions on the Church's "acceptable" list are beekeeping and candlemaking. You'll understand why if you ever set foot in an Orthodox church building: The beeswax votive candle is an important instrument of Church revenue. Unlike the stubby Roman Catholic votive, the Greek Orthodox model is slender and about 4 inches long, and you stick it in sand instead of leaving it on a rack. So I bought a candle, lit it, and said a prayer for Q. — under the influence, perhaps, of Gilbert, who had suffered under Q. more than any of us, yet whose attitude was one of charity and forgiveness.

That night it was Gilbert's turn to fly out, so I accompanied him to the airport. We took an express Metro train from Syntagma Square. Round trip was something like 8 euros — more expensive than the bus, but lots more comfortable. Our only encounter with Metro fare inspectors was on this trip; I guess enforcement's more of a priority when the price is higher.

The airport is the one place in Athens where it's possible to borrow a wheelchair, albeit not without a bit of wheedling. The first leg of Gilbert's flight home to Orange County was on LOT Polish Airlines; he'd change planes in Warsaw. He had an ungodly departure time, like 3:40 a.m., and I was intent on catching up on some of the sleep I'd missed, so I embraced him and left him in the airport. Of course, Gilbert, being an extrovert, struck up a lively conversation with a couple of other travelers before I was out of the terminal. I'm still in touch with Gilbert, who apparently does concert promotion in Riverside County and is talking about taking some bands back to Athens himself. I'd be more than happy to go with him; I'll even push the wheelchair if that's what he wants.

28. Look Out, Wycliffe and Tyndale, There's a New Kid in Town

2006-02-10T17:28:00.000-08:00

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
——The Merchant of Venice, I.iii

Long after I got back from Athens, dear reader, I did something I should've done before I went, something B. had encouraged me to do before I even officially joined Loudmouth: I loaded a copy of Q.'s Bible software onto my laptop and took a look at it.

Why had I hesitated so long? Well, to be completely, bluntly honest, ignorance was bliss. I had spent enough time reading the churlish copy on Q.'s Web site to know that his software couldn't be anything special. But I didn't want to know just how bad it was — because if it turned out to be really awful, I'd have to reconsider my involvement in the band. And I wanted to go to Greece.

Of course, when I got there, Q. expected me to hand out copies of his software, and I used my ignorance of it as a partial excuse for not doing so. If not quite unethical, this wasn't the most honorable thing I've ever done. After I got home and starting writing about my experience, I knew I'd have to review the software at some point. Naturally, it would now be more difficult to approach the task with an open mind: I suspected my opinion of Q. might color my reading of the software, instead of approaching the software as a way to learn more about Q. But that was a risk I would have to take.

As I've already mentioned, my laptop crashed a few days after I installed the software, so my review will be rather perfunctory. And if it's influenced by the way Q. treated me, too bad. He shouldn't have treated me that way.

Perhaps I'd better start at the beginning, with Q.'s credentials. What, exactly, qualifies him to publish Bible software? Well, in his youth he was a member of a Bible quiz team that placed second in a regional tournament. I can do him one better — my Bible quiz team won the first statewide meet we ever attended. Nyah, nyah, nyah. (Here, for entertainment purposes only, is a satirical, fictional piece from LarkNews on the topic of Bible quizzing.) I can say with some authority that quizzing does enable one to rattle off Bible verses, facts, and figures from the germane to the arcane. One of the more entertaining features at Q.'s old Web site, in fact, was a sort of über–Bible quiz containing questions that ranged from relevant to downright bizarre.

What quizzing doesn't do is equip one with a systematic theology or viable hermeneutic. For that one goes to Bible college, and Q. attended Northwest College (now Northwest University), affiliated with the Assemblies of God denomination.

I'm not saying Q. wrote the über–quiz, because I don't know. But one can see in it the influences of both a quizzing background and a conservative Bible college education. From Bible college come classifications and (rather too glib) thematic summaries of Bible books, as well as the basic ideas about Bible interpretation. From quizzing come arcane questions about the length of time Noah spent in the ark and the number of people raised from the dead in the Old Testament, as well as a verse-reference drill. A more troublesome legacy of quizzing, though, is the free-association "prooftexting" approach to Bible interpretation endorsed in question 82:

82. To develop a proper Biblical viewpoint, it is best to...
a. To say what you feel is the best viewpoint
b. Use one scripture to prove the viewpoint
c. Use at least two scriptures to prove the viewpoint
d. Only use verses from the New Testament to develop the viewpoint

The "correct" answer here is c, but that's a dangerously simplistic approach to the Bible. Lots of questionable "viewpoints" — slavery, racism, genocide, human sacrifice, vegetarianism, treating women as property, etc. — can be propped up with two scriptures, if you choose them carefully. Perhaps I shouldn't make too much of this grammatically challenged quiz, but it would appear that although its author has been to Bible college, he or she still confuses "Biblical literacy" with having a head full of trivia, and still thinks that stringing verses together to "prove a viewpoint" is a valid method of interpreting the Bible.*

It so happens that around the time we went to Greece, Sarah was teaching a class at Northwest University, so she asked Q. about his experience there. He told her he didn't value it that much, because he got there already knowing more about the Bible than his professors did. So here's a hypothesis: Armed with the knowledge he's gleaned from Bible quizzing, the author of this quiz goes to Bible college. Perhaps he trips up his professors on some iota of Bible trivia — so he secretly believes he's smarter than they are. He absorbs just enough Bible scholarship to give him a veneer of respectability, but not enough to deflate his hubris.

One needn't hypothesize, however, to find evidence of Q.'s hubris. Back in 1998 there was a page on his Web site placing the release of his own software on a timeline of Bible translations, in a way that implied a comparison between his achievements and those of John Wycliffe and William Tyndale. Let's be clear here: Q. hasn't translated a blessed thing, he's just gathered the works of many translators, English and otherwise, and put them on a CD-ROM. Nothing unique about that — Bible Gateway has already done it online, using an interface that, even after a disappointing redesign, is still far ahead of Q.'s. Bible.cc, while not quite as easy on the eye as Bible Gateway, has also beaten Q. to the punch. The only original contribution by Q. to his software is his boneheaded, misspelled, ungrammatical commentary, the following example of which I extracted from it before my laptop crashed:

The dictionary says... Body In the English it means: A) Flesh of a human being, excluding the spirit. B) A collective of people in one area united together with having commonalties.

What type of building does the Bible call the body? If you owned
a billion dollar building how would you take care of it?
{1 Corinthians 3:16-17}
{1 Corinthians 6:15-20}
{1 Corinthians 9:24-27}

Well, for starters, I would make sure that my building got proper sleep and enough to eat. If you want my two cents, here they are: (1¢) Comparing oneself to Wycliffe and Tyndale is an act of megalomania unless one is willing to face the dangers they faced. (2¢) A person who compares the above excerpt to the literary achievements of Wycliffe and Tyndale deserves to face the dangers they faced. Anyone got a match?

*OK, I know vegetarianism doesn't belong on the list. That was a joke, all right? Ha, ha.

29. Pronoun Trouble

2006-02-10T17:27:00.000-08:00

His own opinion was his law: i' the presence
He would say untruths; and be ever double
Both in his words and meaning.
——Henry VIII, IV.ii

yes we're just one big happy family 'neath the sun
all full of you and me and he and she and it and everyone
oh it's a wacky zany place that we come from
we call it heaven
please take your shoes off;
don't ask no questions
are you having fun?
——Tonio K.

By Thursday morning our merry band of castoffs had dwindled to the the two troublemakers (me and Holly) and our sidekicks (Sarah and Logan). Before Q. returned that evening, we had an important appointment to keep. We again hopped the Metro, this time to the Faliro station for a rendezvous with Michalis.

We weren't content, you see, for the situation to remain hanging the way we had left it Sunday night. Q.'s treatment of us was bad enough, but his attempt to create strife between Michalis and Elias, his two major Greek concert promoters, was even worse. The last thing Greek evangelicals need is some outsider coming in and sowing dissension. So we wanted to accomplish two things: ensure that there was peace between Michalis and Elias, and get Michalis' account of Sunday's telephone conversations with Q.

Michalis met us at the station, took us out for lunch, and then drove us to the office of his employer, AMG International. He assured us that he and Elias would be all right, and that he didn't blame either us or Elias for the difficulties.

We asked Michalis about the professional bands Q. had talked about bringing to Athens. Switchblade had pulled out, and Mob Barley had vanished into thin air, but Feveri$h and Jimmy & the Pullet Pluckers had shown up to play. You may also recall that Q. took me through Omonoia Square on my first night in Athens and said, "We had Feveri$h here the other night."

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: When I mentioned this to Michalis, he seemed shocked. "Wait a minute," he said. "Q. told you he booked Feveri$h? That's a lie. I booked them — and Jimmy & the Pullet Pluckers too. They played the same night. In fact, Q. came up to me while the Pullet Pluckers were playing and said, 'How did you get these guys?'"

Whoa.

Back when I first met Q., he told me the Pullet Pluckers were "one of our bands." At the time I got the mistaken impression that he managed the group or had manufactured it, the same way he was manufacturing Loudmouth. I hadn't thought lately about how unlikely that seemed. Now, however, it appeared that he wasn't even able to book them.

Furthermore, I now realized what Q. meant by "We had Feveri$h here the other night." Suppose the Seattle Mariners swept a series from the Kansas City Royals, and I called my brother in Kansas City and said, "Dude, we really kicked your butt." My brother would understand that I was using my pronouns figuratively. Well, so was Q. "We had Feveri$h here" apparently did not mean that Q. played any direct role in booking Feveri$h, even though he had fostered that impression via his Web site. He'd used the word "we" to take credit for someone else's achievements.

In how many other instances had Q. used a similar trick to artificially enhance his reputation? I've lost count.

(When I got home I did a lot of digging, to answer two questions: (1) What happened to the bands who didn't come? (2) Regarding the bands who did come, under whose auspices did they perform? I learned that the Pullet Pluckers have indeed worked with Q. in the past, and put his Bible software on some of their CDs, which must be what he meant by "one of our bands." But it's abundantly clear that their sponsor in Greece was not Q.'s company but FLAME/More than Gold (the umbrella organization that included Michalis' Logos Music) — despite Q.'s attempts to claim otherwise via press releases and Web copy.

I contacted representatives from three of the four bands in question. Although I have promised not to disclose what they said, it became clear that Q. had treated them more or less the way he treated Loudmouth and Qedem in matters such as schedules, backline, compensation, and plane tickets. So they either didn't come or found a different sponsor. One can hypothesize, then, that the big-time bookings Q. claimed to have had depended on these professional bands, and that when he lost the bands, he lost the bookings. And evidently, one difference between professional and amateur bands is that professionals can tell when they're being jerked around. But I digress.)

Next I told Michalis about Sunday night.

Me: Q. thinks I told you I didn't want to work with him any more. I don't remember telling you that. So where do you think he got the idea?

Michalis: I said to Philemon, "Q.'s own bands don't want to work with him any more." But I didn't mean you, I meant groups like the Pullet Pluckers. People he's worked with in the past don't want to keep working with him.

Ah. Suddenly it all made sense (well, almost). It was easy to see how, in the process of a bilingual game of telephone, the attribution for that remark might shift from Jimmy & the Pullet Pluckers to me. It was equally easy to see how someone as volatile as Q. would see fit to dismiss me from the band for committing such an indiscretion. Except that I didn't commit it.

I had, of course, defied Q. by fulfilling a contract that he had instructed me to break — namely, playing a set at Cosmovision Center for Michalis. The situation can be presented as a nice little ethical dilemma: If B is a subordinate of A, and A instructs B to help him cheat C, is B obligated to obey? Or should B use whatever means he has to try to prevent C from being cheated?

Well, what do you think? All I can say is that even soldiers don't have to follow immoral orders.

30. Have You, at Long Last, No Sense of Decency?

2006-02-10T17:26:00.000-08:00

Parting is such sweet sorrow.
——Romeo and Juliet, II.ii

Michalis had limited time to spend with us. It was Thursday, and he was busy packing up his office and preparing to leave town on Saturday — for a year of compulsory military service. (As I mentioned earlier, every Greek male is required to serve in the army.) We were anxious to get back, too — Sarah and I wanted to clear out of Athens Christian Center and get to our hotel before Q. returned from Thessaloniki.

We almost made it. The four of us returned to the church, where Sarah and I packed up, brought our bags out to the courtyard, and said goodbye to Holly. I suggested that Holly could stay on the extra bed in our hotel room, but she said she thought the worst was over and she'd be OK with Q. for the last few days of the trip. We gave her the hotel's phone number. Just then came a knock at the courtyard gate.

It was John, the road manager for Qedem and husband of Tracy, the drummer — who was getting out of a taxi along with the other girls from her band. Q., they said, was right behind them. I darted into the street and engaged the services of their taxi driver; then I notified Sarah and we began hauling out our bags.

On my last trip out of the courtyard, Q. arrived. I extended my hand, and Q., ever the optimist, thought I was trying to slap him some skin, as if going away for a few days was all it took to earn back my respect. He hadn't seen the set of keys to the church I was holding; I was only trying to give them back. "See ya later," I said to Q., and stepped through the gate. That was the last time I've spoken with him.

Athens cabbies don't like it when you load up the trunk of the taxi with luggage. In fact, some of them charge you extra for the privilege. Our driver seemed unable to arrange our bags in a way that allowed him to close the trunk — and he preferred leaving it open to letting me help him. We ended up driving around town with all our luggage — including my instruments — on display behind us, which made me rather nervous.

The language barrier in the cab was significant. Our hotel, the Acropolis House, was at 6 Kodrou Street, on the other side of the shopping district from Mitropoleos Square — but I couldn't make the driver understand this. I took a stab at spoken Greek — "Οδος Κοδρου." He gave no sign of recognition. I wrote 6 ΚΟΔΡΟΥ on a piece of paper for him. It didn't help. That particular street, I admit, isn't exactly the beaten track, but it's near the city center and has more than one hotel. I couldn't be the first fare who'd ever asked this guy for a ride there. It didn't improve matters when I told him "Acropolis Hotel," which wasn't quite the right name.

As the crow flies, it's no more than a mile from Athens Christian Center to Acropolis House, but since crows don't drive cabs — and because our driver wasn't quite sure where we wanted to go — we actually traveled more like four or five. So there I was, wandering around Athens at the mercy of someone I couldn't communicate with, in constant fear that something might happen to my instruments. Sound familiar? Fortunately, nothing was broken, nothing was stolen, and nobody got hurt.

Eventually the driver stopped and picked up a friend who spoke a smidge of English, and the two of them managed to get us within a few blocks of the hotel, at which point I was able to give the friend some directions. After we got there, the driver and I finally did succeed in communicating. "Δεκα," he said, several times, until I remembered that this was the Greek word for "ten," or about twice what the trip was worth, in euros. Still, I was glad to pay it.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in an Internet café near Mitropoleos, investigating our options for a visit to one of the Greek islands. We settled on Hydra, which both sounded interesting and was close enough for a day trip on a boat. Next we returned to Leonidou Street for a preappointed clandestine meeting with Holly at the phone booth across from the church, at which we confirmed that she and Logan would join us Friday morning for our island excursion.

Walking back from this meeting through Thissio Square, we encountered the rest of the group, who were out for an evening stroll. While Q. and E. glared at us from across the square, we said hi to Desiree and talked for a few minutes with Ben Dally and Brian, who gave us the lowdown on the Thessaloniki trip. It didn't sound as though we'd missed much — according to them, the band had been harassed by drunks at outreach concerts, and a relaxing beach trip planned by Q. became a bit of a bummer when the beach turned out to be three hours away.

The Acropolis House is a small family-run, pensione-style inn. It's old, funky, and dingy, but clean and thoroughly charming — and next to Athens Christian Center, it felt like the Ritz-Carlton. Friday morning we rose early for our first Greek breakfast outside of Starbucks: bread, soft-boiled eggs, coffee, fruit juice, and what looked like prunes but turned out to be some of the saltiest pickled olives I've ever had. We hustled back to the Thissio Metro station for our rendezvous with Holly and Logan, and were surprised to encounter Brian along with them.

Holly, it turned out, had come to say goodbye. If she'd expected a live-and-let-live attitude from Q. and E. upon their return, she'd underestimated them once again. Earlier that morning (2 a.m., to be precise), the dynamic duo had burst into Holly's room and delivered Today's Pearl of Wisdom. They told Holly to start packing — they'd decided her presence was too much of a distraction for the rest of the group. So they were sending her and Logan back to Seattle early — but they didn't say exactly how early. It was now about 7:30, and while Holly was understandably perturbed at this newest turn of events, she was also thrilled to go home, although she didn't yet know when she'd be leaving. Of course, this meant she couldn't accompany us on our island trip.

We later learned that Q. and E. kept Holly in limbo for twenty-four hours before telling her when her new flight was — and at that point, she was leaving only a day ahead of everyone else. She also got stuck with paying a fee to the airline. And if we hadn't gotten E. to cough up our flight itinerary and gone to the Acropolis House, I'm quite certain we'd have received the same treatment as Holly.

And then, of course, I'd be minus a couple of days' worth of adventures to write about. But don't worry, dear reader. The end is in sight.

31. We Meet a Mean Greek

2006-02-10T17:25:00.000-08:00

Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow.
Here in this island we arrived.
——The Tempest, I.ii

Sarah and I said goodbye to Holly and Brian and boarded a Metro train for Piraeus. Once there, we settled on a hydrofoil for our trip to Hydra. It was more expensive than a standard passenger ship, but also a lot smaller and faster.

I complained about a cabdriver in the previous chapter, but at least he tried to help us despite a significant language barrier. So, apart from Q. and E., the only truly unpleasant person we met in Greece was the purser on board our hydrofoil.

In Greek mythology, of course, the Hydra was a nasty, nine-headed, people-eating beast slain by Heracles as one of his twelve labors. Our purser didn't have nine heads or eat people, but she proved that she could be nasty. I must admit the initial offense was ours: We failed to get off the boat at Hydra. We didn't hear the PA announcement, didn't know where we were, and didn't realize we had only a couple of minutes to disembark. I didn't figure it out until the boat had pulled away from the dock and was headed toward the next island, Spetses. So I found the purser, a slender blonde with heavy eyelids and a long nose, and told her what had happened.

A word of advice to those of you in customer service: When a customer admits to a boneheaded mistake, it's best if you don't assume a condescending air and say "Why?" It takes great humility for your customers to admit they were wrong, and asking them why just puts them immediately back on the defensive. It also frustrates them, because they usually won't have a good answer for you. People don't know why they make dumb mistakes; if we did know, we probably wouldn't make them.

The purser must have seen that I was flummoxed, though, because she sweetened up and said we should get off at Spetses and wait for the boat to return (it was going to one more island, I forget which). Then we could take it back to Hydra. This seemed reasonable enough, so we complied. According to the schedule posted on the dock at Spetses, we had only about 20 minutes to wait, which was just long enough to nearly get hit by someone on a rented moped and discover that the ATM at what appeared to be the island's only bank was out of order. (Since the hydrofoil had cost more than we'd anticipated, we needed more euros.)

When the boat came back, the purser recognized us, but instead of letting us aboard, she said, "Did you buy tickets to Hydra?"

Flummoxed again, I said no. She turned up her chin, looked at me down her nose, and spat out, in the tone of voice one might use with a dog that has overturned one's garbage pail: "You have to."

While this requirement was certainly reasonable, it was the first time the young lady had mentioned it. Why on earth she didn't tell us when we got off at Spetses I don't know — but judging from her demeanor, it was her way of getting even with us for being dumb Americans. Because guess what: you can't buy the tickets on the boat. Away to the ticket office we ran, but in the meantime the boat left, and we were now stuck on Spetses for another hour and a half.

Which, in itself, wasn't a bad thing. We found a working ATM, took a carriage ride and saw a bit of the island, and ate lunch at a seafood restaurant with freshly caught octopuses hanging up on a wire to dry outside. Our purser friend, thank heaven, wasn't on the next boat, and we saw nothing further of her. I can't chalk our misunderstanding up to a language barrier; her English was just fine. There was simply no real effort on her part to help us. She was, let's face it, just mean.

The charming thing about Hydra is that, unlike Spetses, it doesn't allow motorized transport. You get around on foot or by donkey, and we did a bit of both. We bought a lot of gifts for relatives and some sandals for ourselves, and poked around a monastery for a few minutes.

Back in Athens, we decided we were tired of Greek food, so we ate at what is surely one of the world's most overpriced Mexican restaurants, a few blocks from Acropolis House. Twenty-five euros for a couple of basic beans-and-rice burritos and a quesadilla.

At the next table was one of several American pin collectors we'd seen around Athens: guys who bought and traded souvenir pins for all the Olympic events, and wore hundreds of them on hats and vests everywhere they went. This particular collector was from Georgia, and couldn't shut up about how great this Mexican food was. I wonder if he ever ate Mexican food in Georgia. I have, and it's better there than it is in Greece.

Perhaps Mexican ingredients aren't easy to get in Athens, or perhaps that's just what the restaurateur wanted us to think. Either way, next time I think I'll stick with Greek food a little longer. And if I ever go to Mexico, I'm avoiding Greek restaurants there.

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: I almost wish I didn't have to report this, since today was the first and only day in Greece that Sarah and I had entirely to ourselves, and it seems a shame to drag Q. into an episode in which he had no role. However, the Pearl of Wisdom in question is so astonishing that I'd be remiss in not recounting it.

Earlier I said that we had several encounters with film crews in Athens. Well, months later I discovered what one of them had been up to: It was a crew from a certain European country, shooting a documentary about American evangelical missionaries at the Olympics. Actually, that's not quite accurate. Given the recent political ascendancy of American evangelicals, capped off by the election of George W. Bush, the filmmakers were worried that those evangelicals are now trying to extend their newfound influence into Europe — and they, the filmmakers, tried to answer this question by sending film crews after missionaries at the Olympics. I haven't seen the film yet, although the excerpts posted at the filmmakers' Web site seem to indicate that their answer would be a big fat yes. In other words, where missionaries see themselves as trying to address the world's spiritual needs, these filmmakers saw only another attempt at political hegemony.

What does Q. have to do with any of this? Well, they interviewed him. I don't know when or where, but he shows up quite unmistakably in one of those Web excerpts. And what does he say to reassure these suspicious Europeans, who think he's after their parliament buildings, not their souls? Get this: He says European Christians need to walk across Europe and "reclaim" the continent for God.

As one who's somewhat conversant with this particular strain of evangelical thinking, it's obvious to me that Q. was talking about some kind of "spiritual warfare"–type "prayer walking" across Europe. However, although that might be what he meant, you can bet it isn't what that film crew heard. If they were looking for proof that American evangelicals had political designs on Europe, Q. had just handed it to them, gift-wrapped.

Allow me to make myself clear. I do agree that Europe desperately needs spiritual renewal. I just don't think it's very smart to talk about spiritual renewal in military/political terms. I don't know, of course, whether Q. had any idea how the film would be slanted — but it might not have made any difference. He might have said the same thing anyway, blissfully unaware of the cultural divide between himself and his audience — as on most occasions when I observed him talking to Europeans.

It's things like this that fuel my own religious identity crisis. You see, I have no doubt that American evangelicals are systematically and often deliberately misunderstood, both at home and abroad. But I'm just about equally certain that they often do and say things that either practically beg to be misunderstood or are just plain dumb. So am I an evangelical or not? Well, get that camera out of my face and maybe we can talk about it.

32. Fall from Grace

2006-02-10T17:24:00.000-08:00

It lies in you, my lord, to bring me in some grace,
for you did bring me out.
——All's Well That Ends Well, V.ii

And so, dear readers, we come to my last day in Athens. I've procrastinated for weeks on writing this entry. Maybe I'm afraid of success, which would explain why so many of my personal projects remain unfinished. But this isn't the end of the tale; I have at least a couple more chapters in store.

Maybe I'm afraid of failure. If I intended to warn unsuspecting musicians away from going to the Olympics with Q., I've failed — he's already taken another team to the Winter Olympics in Torino.

Maybe I'm too busy. Or maybe I'm afraid no one cares. But, dear reader, even if you don't care, that's no excuse for leaving this work unfinished. I'm doing this for me first and you second.

So then.

Sarah and I took breakfast at Acropolis House again, and then split up for the morning. She wanted to return to Leonidou Street and take some pictures of the neighborhood; I had a rendezvous at Hope Place with Philemon, who had been trying for several days to arrange a time for me to record with his band, Proin.

But Philemon wasn't there when I arrived, so I left him a note and moved on to Plan B: visiting the famous National Archaelogical Museum of Athens, just half a mile or so up the road from Hope Place. One simply doesn't go to Athens, methought, without availing oneself of the opportunity to behold the "death mask of Agamemnon" and exquisite sculpture like the Artemision Jockey, the bronze statue of Poseidon, and whatever else I saw on my mad one-hour dash through forty huge rooms of priceless antiquities.

I'm like that with museums, don't ask me why. The Louvre, the British Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago — seen 'em all, but in a blur. In Athens, I was worried about meeting Sarah at our appointed time. I should have gone back early to find her so we could both visit the museum — I'm not the only one in the family who appreciates classical sculpture.

After leaving the museum I returned to Hope Place, and this time Philemon was there. He had no recording gear with him, so we gave up the idea of my playing on his CD. But I had a couple of apologies to make: one, for being the occasion of strife between Philemon and Michalis; and two (and I broke down and wept when I said this), for letting Q.'s shenanigans distract me from the evangelistic purposes of the trip.

Philemon tried to reassure me. "When we started working with Q.," he said, "we knew there would be problems."

Ah, so Elias and Philemon had reservations about Q., but worked with him anyway. Kind of like me. Maybe they couldn't get anyone better. I guess if reasonable, decent, honest American Christians don't do enough to represent Jesus to the world, then the idiots will gladly do it for them.

I left Hope Place with a promise to Philemon to return that evening with my violin. I bought some shirts and a couple of rebetika CDs on the way to Leonidou Street, where the first familiar face I found was Aziz, the Iraqi-Kurdish tavernkeeper. I flagged him down. "Aziz," I said. "The food: mumtaz. Shikren." (Excellent; thank you.) I don't know any Kurdish, and that's about the extent of my Arabic. For all I know, addressing a Kurd in Arabic might be like speaking German to a Jew. But Aziz didn't seem offended, and he might have even understood me.

I found Sarah; we returned to the hotel and spent the rest of the afternoon packing. Turns out she had bumped into our bandmate Brian while photographing the neighborhood around Athens Christian Center. She had inquired after Holly, and that's when Brian told her about...

Today's Pearl of Wisdom: As threatened, Q. and E. sent Holly and Logan home one day early. International air travel is tough for a person with a guitar, two large suitcases, a baby, a stroller, and whatever other luggage Holly had, so Brian and Ben Dally had accompanied her to the airport. When they got back, they told us, E. chewed them out. They shouldn't have helped Holly, E. said, because Holly was the "enemy." Then, while Brian and Ben were still asleep the next morning, Q. and E. left them locked inside Athens Christian Center until mid-afternoon while they went somewhere with the rest of the group. They'd just returned and let Brian out before he encountered Sarah.

In the evening Sarah and I went back to Hope Place for the rendezvous with Philemon. Dining tables were set up, and they were filled with people I didn't recognize. After I got the violin out, we took a couple of seats near the tiny stage, noshed on cookies, and struck up a conversation with the two nearest gentlemen, who turned out to be missionaries. One was a Scotsman missing several teeth, and the other was an Australian. I've forgotten their names. I remember the Scotsman talking about opening up a hospitality center for missionaries somewhere in Athens, with thirty beds or so — which sounded very appealing after a week and a half at Athens Christian Center.

In the course of the conversation, the gentlemen asked what we were doing in Athens. So we started telling our story, but just when I came to the part about our difficulties, I happened to glance into a mirror hanging on a nearby support column — and spotted Q.'s face.

I did feel a small measure of relief to know that Q.'s reflection actually could be seen in a mirror, but I realized it wouldn't do to give the gentlemen any further details. After the second or two that it takes to recover from the shock of realizing that one's nemesis has entered the room behind one's back, I changed the subject. Q. was accompanied by B.; I'm sure they had seen us, but they remained in the back corner near the doorway.

The evening's proceedings began with another missionary who got up and spoke for a while; then Elias invited B. onto the platform with his guitar. Then B. invited me up—a move I wasn't expecting, and the first time either he or Q. had acknowledged my presence. I had less respect for B. than I did at the start of the trip, but he still knew how to be a class act. I looked at Q., who nodded his approval, so I stepped onto the platform and plugged in my violin.

I don't remember the first two songs we played. The third was my suggestion: a cover of U2's "Grace." I'd never heard the original; B. had taught me the song. At the time the irony of the situation didn't occur to me, but I've reflected on it many times since. Just get a load of these lyrics:

What once was hurt
What once was friction
What left a mark
No longer stings
Because Grace makes beauty
Out of ugly things

One can't, of course, achieve such things merely by singing about them. I still don't think "grace" means I should have pretended everything was hunky-dory when my fellow believers practiced deceit, manipulation, abuse, and false witness. In our situation, "grace" might have consisted of me and Q. sitting down together, confessing our faults to each other, and asking forgiveness for them. We'd had a couple of encounters where that could have happened, but didn't — partly because Q. had other things on his mind.

I certainly don't wish to blame the impasse entirely on Q. Goodness knows I made my share of mistakes on the trip, and I hope I've been clear about them. And now here I was, onstage with B., who was singing about the ideal of grace in front of two guys who had fallen well short of that ideal. Maybe B. and I should have played "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."

Q. and I left without a word to each other. It occurred to me much later that Philemon had invited both of us, perhaps intending to facilitate a rapprochement. Well, I had accepted B.'s invitation to play, which I didn't have to do after being kicked out of the band. And Q. had allowed me to play, which he didn't have to do after kicking me out of the band. So perhaps we weren't complete failures in the game of grace, but we still had a long way to go.

Speaking of long ways to go, Sarah and I returned to Acropolis House and made our final preparations to depart for our 2 a.m. flight. At about 10:45 p.m. we left there for the last time. Just as we reached the Syntagma Square Metro station, I discovered the bulge in my back pocket: our room key, which was attached to a wooden doorknob in lieu of a keychain. There wasn't time to take it back to the hotel and still catch the express train to the airport. Remarkably, there was a customer-service office open; just as remarkably, the staff seemed positively bewildered at my request: that they take care of returning the key to the hotel for me. Fortunately another Metro employee came along who understood customer service better than the customer-service staff.

At the airport, Q. and E. stood off by themselves while Sarah and I chatted with the rest of the group. Ken and Barbie looked exceptionally well rested; they had gone to the island of Santorini instead of to Thessaloniki.

Of our flight there isn't much to tell. Mercifully, most of the group, including Q. and E., were on another plane. Our one flightmate, several rows ahead of us, was B., to whom we didn't speak much, and to whom I haven't spoken much since. Except when he e-mailed to warn me about the lawsuit — but that's a tale for another day.

33. The Interlocutors

2006-02-10T17:23:00.000-08:00

And yet I am sure you are not satisfied
Of these events at full. Let us go in;
And charge us there upon inter'gatories,
And we will answer all things faithfully.
——The Merchant of Venice, V.i

This is the entry where I talk back to the voices in my head.

I'm going to answer, as best I can, my doubts about my big fat Greek vacation, doubts that concern what happened on the trip as well as what I've written about it. But I won't stop there.

Archibald MacLeish wrote a play called J.B., based on the Biblical book of Job. As reviewer Joe Adcock writes in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "Job was reproached by Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite. J.B. has to contend with a Freudian, a Calvinist and a Leninist. In either case, the hero/victim of multiple catastrophes has to listen to people who try to explain away his misery by putting it into their favorite version of a larger picture."

In the spirit, perhaps, of MacLeish, I'll endeavor to address objections from across the spectrum of opinion — several of which are not my own, although I can well imagine someone else raising them.

But if you have objections that aren't addressed here, kindly let me know.

1. The problem here, Martin, is your attitude. It's very telling that you call this project your big fat Greek vacation. It was supposed to be a mission trip — you weren't going as a tourist.
Well, "My big fat Greek mission trip" just doesn't have the same punch. I used the word "vacation" partly for irony's sake, as I'm the sort of person who too often tries to combine work and pleasure when I travel. Sarah has been on other trips with me — to Ireland and Hawaii — that also involved my playing a lot of music and were somewhat less than ideal vacations.

Rest assured that I know the difference between a vacation and a mission trip. Q. warned me in advance about the primitive accommodations, and while I've bellyached a bit in print about Athens Christian Center, I didn't complain much about it during the trip. He also told us to expect to work long hours, and I didn't mind that either, as long as those hours were spent doing something constructive, like rehearsing or performing or praying and singing together. I did resent the time lost due to poor leadership: being kept awake late at night, or having to sit around and wait for Q. to crawl out of bed and make up his mind about the day's events. As it turned out, there was time to sightsee and still keep Q.'s schedule; one just had to take a carpe diem approach to the sightseeing.

"Mission trip" does imply hardships and privations. It's one thing, though, when those hardships are a natural part of the work in its due course, and quite another thing when one's leaders create them unnecessarily.

I did fall short of proper mission-trip behavior in one area: for the most part I avoided handing out stuff to people. Now that I know how crappy Q.'s Bible software is, I am glad I didn't distribute it, but there were occasions when I could have helped hand out actual Bibles and other literature, and I didn't do it. I've already given my reasons — physical and emotional fatigue, hunger, concern that someone would steal my instruments — but I must admit that others overcame these obstacles.

Finally, Q. sold the trip to us in travel-brochure terms, with lots of talk about performing "at the Olympics," "in the shadow of the Acropolis," "in the footsteps of the Apostle Paul," etc. Perhaps I'm guilty of taking all that stuff too literally. Q. was just trying to get us excited about the trip.

2. You were wasting your time going on a mission trip to Greece. You knew it was a Christian country already, or hadn't you heard of the Orthodox Church? You evangelicals have a lot of nerve.
If the Orthodox Church is capable of meeting the spiritual needs of all Greeks, explain Vathis Square. It's just possible that we got through to some of the folks there in a way the Orthodox Church never has.

In countries that don't have church/state separation, the church tends to get distracted from its mission and become corrupted over time. That's what precipitated the Protestant Reformation. It's happened with the Church of England; it's happened with the Lutheran church in the Scandinavian countries; and from the looks of things, it's happened with the Greek Orthodox Church, unless someone has an alternate explanation for why the majority of Greeks are atheists, or why the Church needs an anti-proselytization law to fend off the competition. (I've discussed this a little with a couple of acquaintances who attend Orthodox churches in Canada. But their churches are affiliated with the Russian Orthodox church, which, rather than being weakened by affiliation with the state, has had 70 years of Communist oppression to put some fire in its belly.)

Nonetheless, and I can't say this too emphatically, God's church is far-flung and diverse, and he is at work in every part of it, even in the parts I don't know much about. Orthodoxy intrigues me, and I wished I'd studied up on it a bit more before going to Athens. To put it mildly, evangelicals could learn a lot from the Orthodox, who can trace the history of their faith in an unbroken line all the way back to Jesus and the apostles. (Some evangelicals, on the other hand, act as though Jesus didn't exist until they discovered him. And evangelicals aren't doing such a hot job of meeting their country's spiritual needs. There are a lot of places like Vathis Square in America.) On the other hand, perhaps the Orthodox could learn something from evangelicals about the sort of missionary zeal that sends one halfway around the world to proclaim one's faith to a culture hungry for truth. Dialogue, people, that's what we need.

My thoughts about Orthodoxy-vs.-Protestantism are far from settled, so I reserve the right to change my mind about all of this. I have more inquiries to make.

(None of the foregoing should be construed as a defense of Q., who acted as though the Orthodox Church didn't exist. And I'd just love to know how he got on with the Roman Catholics in Italy.)

Furthermore, part of the idea of doing missions during the Olympics is that people from countries like China and Morocco and Saudi Arabia would be there — countries where it's a crime to preach the gospel whether or not you wear a robe and a funny hat. We weren't there just for Greeks.

3. That brings up my point: what you call missionary work is nothing more than cultural hegemony. You shouldn't try to change others' belief systems.
If I agreed with that, I would have stayed home. It's funny how people who say it's wrong to change others' belief systems always start by attacking my belief system.

4. Your responsibility as a Christian was to submit to your leaders.
And their responsibility was to follow the Biblical model of leadership: "Whoever would be great among you must be your servant" (Mark 10:43).

I'll admit my own servant-attitude dried up pretty quickly on the trip, but at least I started out with one. The ideal of Christian service doesn't work unless everyone participates and agrees on what it means, and I think Q. and I were pretty far apart on that question. So-called leaders who ignore this model of service shouldn't be surprised if their followers do the same.

I hope, however, that I have learned the importance of trusting my crap detector. I ignored my initial misgivings about Q., and I don't intend to repeat that mistake if I'm ever in a similar situation. If I have doubts about a leader, I should remove myself from under his leadership, no matter what it costs me.

5. This is nothing but slander and gossip.
First of all, slander refers to oral communication; libel refers to writing. In order for a piece of writing to be libelous, it must fulfill two conditions: (1) it has to demonstrably injure someone's reputation; (2) it has to be false. I use pseudonyms for a reason, and have labored strenuously to say only what is accurate and true.

As for gossip, that's a word with myriad definitions, but most of those definitions involve Dick repeating information about Jane that is none of Dick's business, or for which Jane has some reasonable expectation of privacy, or without sufficient regard on Dick's part for accuracy or factuality. In the present case I submit that none of these conditions apply.

6. What are you complaining about? You came, you saw, you played some gigs, and you even had a week by yourselves to do whatever you wanted.
Yeah, those of us who were kicked out may have had more fun in the end than those who weren't. But we went through hell to get it.

Again, it was the misrepresentation that bothered me more than the particular circumstances of the trip. Here's a simple analogy: Let's say I notice a restaurant with huge banners proclaiming how great its lemon meringue pie is, so I walk in and order some, and get steamed mussels instead. I point out the discrepancy to the waiter, who tells me I must be crazy. I like both dishes, but that isn't the point. The mussels might be delicious, but that isn't the point either. The point is that the restaurant misrepresented its wares.

7. I see fault on both sides.
Congratulations — so do I! Of course, the easiest way to see both sides of an issue is to sit on the fence, and I urge you not to do that. Where do you think the preponderance of the fault lies, and which of us has more forthrightly admitted his faults? (You might want to wait and read the next entry before you answer.)

8. Aren't you being judgmental?
Ah yes, the J-word. The relativism of our age posits only two morally unacceptable behaviors: (a) offending someone and (b) "being judgmental." (Of course it's more than a little hypocritical to call someone else judgmental, because in so doing you're, um, judging that person. See the problem?) The Bible often gets dragged in to support this idea, because it contains a verse that says "Judge not, that you not be judged." (Never mind the immediate context that verse comes from, or the surrounding context of the Bible's other statements on the topic, or the way the Christian church has interpreted that verse throughout history — even people who don't know any other Bible verses can be downright dogmatic about that one.)

In truth, every sane person uses judgment hundreds of times every day, and we really wouldn't want it any other way. Someone who exercised no judgment at all, who had no concept of right or wrong, would be either a naive victim or a dangerous sociopath. So some types of judgment must be desirable and acceptable. And although the Bible does warn that we'll be judged by the same standards we use to judge others, it also encourages us to use what it calls "sober judgment" or "righteous judgment."

Here's how I interpret that: We should judge only what we can observe, a phrase which here means that while we may judge other people's actions (what they do), we should leave it to God to judge their motives (why they do those things). If you see someplace where I've inferred some motive of Q.'s that I couldn't know, and then judged it, kindly point that out.

9. You're only trying to justify yourself.
This accusation implies that I know I did something wrong and am trying to make out after the fact that it wasn't really wrong. And if that's what you think, dear reader, then either I haven't been clear enough or you haven't been reading very carefully. Naturally I've cast myself in the best possible light, but even so, where I believe I was wrong I have admitted it.

10. Hey, give the guy a break. You went on a tour years ago with some big-shot professional music ministry like Continentals, and now you're trying to apply their standards to a shoestring operation.
I refer thee first to this marvelous blog post by screenwriter John August. It's called "Professional Writing and the Rise of the Amateur." While August is talking specifically about writing, his thesis applies to just about every human endeavor: You don't get to choose when you're being a "professional" and when you're being an "amateur." Your work is your work. It's possible for people without a lot of money, training or credentials to do good work (witness the King's Kids), just as it's possible for people with all three of those attributes, in spades, to do work that really blows (witness just about any big-studio Hollywood film released between New Year's Day and the Academy Awards ceremony).

So, while it's true that Q. isn't a well-funded, full-time professional in touring music ministry, that is absolutely no excuse for his unprofessional behavior. As I've mentioned, Q. assumed that I was a professional, so I did my best to behave like one, and I have nothing to be ashamed of on that score. Q., on the other hand, spent plenty of time trying to pass himself off as a professional, with all his posturing about big-name bands and corporate sponsors and radio airplay, so it's even more of an egregious shame that he spent minimal time actually acting professionally. If, as Q. himself confessed, he lacked the experience and know-how to lead a trip like ours, then he first should have tried attaching himself to some other touring ministry in a non-leadership role in order to learn the ropes. I would suggest Continentals, but Q. lacks any of the musical and technical skills they need, and they don't have room on the bus for dead weight.

11. Why don't you just put it behind you — you know, forgive and forget?
There are two senses of forgiveness: the put-it-behind-you, love-your-enemies sense and the be-reconciled-to-your-brother sense. If I haven't forgiven Q. in the first sense, it ain't for a lack of trying. What happened in Greece is part of the past, and that's where it belongs. Writing about it has helped me to process what happened, which for me is a necessary part of getting over it. I am, believe it or not, a lot less angry at Q. than I was when I started this project.

But let's say I get mugged on a certain side of a certain street in a certain block. Although I might well forgive the mugger, I might also avoid that part of the street in the future, and warn others: "Be careful, I was mugged on that street once." I might also recount the mugging as an anecdote, or to illustrate certain points I might want to make.

In a similar fashion, the purpose of the Big Fat Greek Vacation is to warn other Christian musicians about potential pitfalls, not just with Q. but with any other shady operators who might resemble him. Musicians love to swap bad-gig stories, and Christian musicians are no different. Maybe, just maybe, someone can learn from my experience without having to endure my miseries. It's natural for Christian believers to want to trust other believers, especially when those other believers offer to fly them to Greece. But trust must be earned. If it isn't, it's little better than naivete.

Even in this first sense, forgiveness does not consist of sweeping the events under the rug and pretending they didn't happen.

The second sense of forgiveness is a higher ideal: If someone treats me in a manner that is unethical and destructive, and I have reason to believe that those behaviors are part of a pattern, then perhaps my forgiveness ought to look less like walking away and more like trying to find a way to put an end to the behavior pattern — for the sake of both the person who hurt me and the other people he might hurt.

Forgiving Q. in the second sense would involve each of us making confession, i.e., giving an honest account of his own offenses and striving not to repeat them. On my own part, where appropriate in the Vacation, I've tried to do that. On Q.'s part, there recently was some actual progress, slight and short-lived though it might have been. More later about that.

34. How to Succeed at Forgiveness without Really Trying

2006-02-10T17:22:00.000-08:00

For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother
Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive
Thy rankest fault.
——The Tempest, V.i

Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them more.
——Oscar Wilde

It was only natural for me to talk to friends when I got back and tell them what a rotten time I had. I even filled in my pastor, since he'd been kind enough to write the letter of recommendation for me.

Meanwhile I exchanged a handful of e-mails with B. I wanted two things: to borrow a vintage tenor banjo he'd told me about, and to discuss the Greece trip in retrospect. He said we could meet, but we never established a time.

Then one day he sent an e-mail asking me to call him, so I did, and got quite a shock. Q., as B. had told me back in Greece, reported to a supervisory board. Now some members of that board wanted to sue me for slander. I've already explained why that charge is unfounded, but still, a lawsuit is a nasty thing.

I didn't know much about Q.'s board — only what B. had told me. Q.'s Olympic-outreach organization purports to be a nonprofit; nonprofits have boards; ergo, Q. reports to a board. Members of this board, B. said, were missionaries and ministers in various parts of the world. B. thought I should talk to one of the board members if I wished to avoid being sued, but he wouldn't give me any contact information. He said he preferred that I get it from Q.

Well, I appreciated his warning, and I had plenty to say to Q.'s board, but I preferred not to talk to Q. (Maybe that's nothing but stubborn pride — you be the judge.) Furthermore, I didn't believe he'd really tell me anything, and I thought there might be another way to get the information. So I tried the gumshoe approach. Since I work for a nonprofit, I knew that registered nonprofits are required by law to publicize the names of their board members. So I investigated, but all I learned was that Q.'s organization isn't registered with the Washington state government and doesn't have 501(c)(3) status with the IRS — at least not with the name and contact information he currently uses.

More later about that.

Meanwhile, I decided the threat of a lawsuit was merely an attempt to silence me, and in defiance of it I started not only talking about my trip, but writing about it. The present blog is the result.

Speaking of results: One happy result of spending two weeks with Logan was that Sarah and I overcame our fear of babies. And so, on Father's Day 2005 we welcomed Sebastian into the world. But not long after that, at the end of August, my father died. Those events reshaped my priorities, leaving me a lot less time for writing. So I put aside the Big Fat Greek Vacation for a while, although I kept an eye on Q.'s Web sites. After all, there are more important things in life.

But if I thought Q. had forgotten about me, I was mistaken. Here, in its entirety, without comment or commercial interruption, is the text of an e-mail Q. sent out of the blue on November 19, 2005 — fourteen months after our adventures in Greece:

This is for Brian, Martin and Holly

First off. We forgive each of you for the things you did and for the things you said. For the lies you have told about us, for the gossip that some of you continue to spread and for the hateful looks that you have give us and for the justification you have given for it all and for anything that we don't know about. We forgive you, we forgive you and we forgive you!!!

Second, even though we said this in Greece to each of you and several times, it is due repeating here. If there was some way we wronged you or something that upset you that we did or some way we sinned against you. Please forgive us. If you have then can you stop talking about it so much if you have and encourage the others likewise because to everyone else it would appear that you do not forgive and they feel like they have to choose sides and we have told them "Please don't get into a sides thing". We know we are not perfect and that God's grace is the only thing to cover all our mistake.

Next, we know that you love God and want to use your talents for His glory. Please remember the same is true of us.

Finally, we could list what others have said, to appear more right on both sides probably and we can list all the ways each of us failed each other but instead let us move on to what God has called us to through His example and have grace for each other in it. And if there are any continued complaints bring them directly and let us deal with them instead of doing it through gossip and thinking that that might fix it. We know all these troubles are rooted in the enemy trying to steal experiences from our christian walk. We hope you see this as well. The devil does not want us to live in harmony.

We hope this resolves that matter. We pray for your success in Him and so you know we ourselves, are going to reclaim the experience that should have been in Greece that the enemy stoled.

Well, I composed a white-hot, two-page reply to this, tossing around terms like "antinomian" and "cheap grace" and "blaming your shortcomings on the devil," but just before I clicked the Send button I reconsidered. After all, Q., in his own way, seemed to be extending me an olive branch (albeit a Russian one). Now, I still wasn't going to offer him a list of my complaints. One, I'd seen in Greece exactly how he dealt with people who complained. Two, if, after everything that transpired, he truly didn't realize he'd done anything wrong, then bringing complaints directly to him could only elicit further denial. But, I decided, maybe this was the time to finally take B.'s advice. So I e-mailed back:

Dear Q.,

Please send me the names and contact information for the board members to whom you report. I will be happy to discuss my grievances with them.

Sincerely,

Martin

And I received the following reply:

Martin

I will have one of them make contact with you at their earliest available time. Most are missionaries around the world so expect a delay in response.

But also a heads up one of the biggest mistakes they feel I made (and B. has said this as well). the mistake was to not boot you from the trip sooner. Also after research and talking to several individual including B. they felt that you needed some serious therapy. Just thought I would let you know.

Q.

Whatever else can be said about these two e-mails from Q., it appears that forgiveness and gossip are not mutually exclusive after all. Months later I am still waiting to hear from Q.'s board member, for whom I have prepared a list of penetrating questions. Meanwhile, I remain grateful to Q. for his submission of original content to the Big Fat Greek Vacation. One simply can't make up stuff this good.

35. The Truth about Booth

2006-02-10T17:20:00.000-08:00

Tear him to pieces; he's a conspirator.
——Julius Caesar, III.iii

In March 2005 Sarah and I spent a weekend in Washington, D.C. We had little time for sightseeing, but I made it a priority to visit Ford's Theatre, scene of Lincoln's assassination — an event that has fascinated me since I first learned about it in childhood.

The timing couldn't have been better, as I had just finished reading the book American Brutus by Michael W. Kauffman — perhaps the best-researched account of how John Wilkes Booth conducted the assassination conspiracy. Here are a few paragraphs from the introduction:

Misdirection was Booth's secret weapon. It was not only a form of life insurance, but it helped him place attention just where he wanted it. Through lies and false insinuations, he crafted the impression that his conspiracy against Lincoln was larger than it actually was. He did this to boost his credibility, to confuse potential witnesses, to prod his cohorts into action, and to entrap anyone who might potentially betray his trust.
It seems clever in retrospect, but it wasn’t hard to do. He told friends he was heading for New York when he was actually going to Washington. He claimed to have struck it rich in the oil business, though he never made a cent. He implied he was working with Confederate agents, but his only contacts were personal. He stretched the facts at every phase of the plot. On stage or off, he was always an actor.

Kauffman's book goes on to describe Booth's machinations in considerable detail, working from statements his co-conspirators gave during the investigation and trials that followed Lincoln's assassination. According to Kauffman, Booth never gathered his cronies together at once or in the same place; some of them never even met each other. What he said about the nature and purpose of the plot depended on which conspirator he was talking to, so any two of them might have conflicting information. He succeeded at keeping most of them in the dark most of the time, and conducted many of his meetings right under the nose of a War Department clerk, Louis J. Weichmann, who had no idea what was going on.

Disclaimer: Any resemblance between the tactics of John Wilkes Booth as described by Kauffman and the tactics of individuals described in other posts on this blog is purely coincidental.

P.S. I think I'll add Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation to my reading list.

36. And the Hits Just Keep Comin'

2006-02-10T17:19:00.000-08:00

Upon my life, by some device or other
The villain is o'er-raught of all my money.
——The Comedy of Errors, I.ii

In March 2006 there was a flurry of activity on Q.'s various Web sites.

He put up a poster and some online clips from his film project — but if you read carefully, the clips are identified as deleted scenes, and primary shooting isn't even finished yet. More about that in a minute.

He began selling "exclusive preview" versions of upcoming CDs from B. and Six Steps to Heaven. Excuse me — he wasn't selling them, he was offering them as gifts for a $25 tax-deductible donation (later reduced to $10) to raise funds. How much was he trying to raise? $70,000. What was it for? Several more international missions projects in 2006, all connected in some way to the film project.

All this was described in a seven-page prospectus, downloadable from one of the Web sites. Since this prospectus comes from Q., naturally it's vague, but it sounds as though parts of these mission projects will be captured on camera, for footage to be used in the film project. So completion of the film depended on the missions projects, and the missions projects depended on your donation, for which you were supposed to get an "exclusive preview" of a CD that might not even be finished yet, according to its description on another of the sites.

Elsewhere Q. claimed to be "finishing up production" on the film. That usually means that all original footage is already in the can, but to Q. it clearly means something else.

What intrigued me, though, was all this talk of tax-deductible donations. Q. hadn't openly solicited donations on his site in a while, but he was definitely back at it. So I did a little more gumshoe work, and learned that Q. was breaking the law. As long as he (a) remained unregistered with the IRS; (b) solicited donations; and (c) claimed that they were tax deductible, he was in clear violation of Chapter 100, Item 7(a) of Washington's Charitable Solicitations Act (Revised Code of Washington, section 19.09). Here's the text of said law; here's a handy brochure from the state Attorney General's office explaining it. Whether this law requires Q. to register with the Washington Secretary of State as well as the IRS is a murkier question: it evidently depends on how much he collects from in-state sources.

I kept reading RCW 19.09 and determined that Q. could be subject to a $1,000 fine from the Secretary of State's office for each donation he's collected in violation of the law, and could earn himself a cease-and-desist order from the state Attorney General. Furthermore, anyone who'd given him money (including, presumably, Stinky Cheeseman and Picante Chilipepa, who allegedly bankrolled the Greece trip), could sue him and recover up to three times the amount of the donation.

I began to salivate. My nemesis was illegally soliciting funds, and I could prove it. First I needed a receipt. I used a credit card to donate $25 online, in my own name, to Q.'s organization for a copy of B.'s "exclusive preview" CD. Then I printed out the electronic receipt. As I expected, it lacked what's called an Employer ID Number (EIN) — the unique number assigned by the IRS to every registered nonprofit, which is supposed to appear on receipts for tax-deductible donations. I didn't really expect Q. to send me a CD, but no matter — that receipt was easily worth $25 to me. I printed it out, along with the relevant pages from Q.'s Web sites, and sent an e-mail to the Charities Division of the Washington Secretary of State's office. I'd done my homework, and I had the goods. Surely the Charities Division, armed with my information, would aggressively pursue the transgressor.

Wouldn't they?

37. I've Got You under My Skin

2006-02-10T17:18:00.000-08:00

There's no justice in earth nor hell.
——Titus Andronicus, IV.iii

The other day my longsuffering wife, Sarah, remarked that she's never seen anyone get under my skin the way Q. has. Now that I've told the entire tale of what happened in Greece, Sarah wanted to know why I haven't just dropped the whole thing and gotten on with my life, the way other ex-Loudmouths have (e.g., Brian and Holly).

Good question.

I wish I could sit here and say with a straight face that there's nothing personal about this — no element of revenge, of wanting to see justice done on somebody else, as Bruce Cockburn put it. Well, I can't. There probably is such an element. But that's not all there is to it. First, as I've stated earlier, I think it would be a good idea to try to prevent other musicians from suffering under Q.'s abuse and mismanagement — or at least to warn them.

Second, my original motive for investigating Q.'s nonprofit status was not to get him in trouble but to see whether I could learn the identities of his board members. If Q. didn't want me sniffing around, he could have just put me in touch with his board, as he promised to do in November 2005.

Third, when you see someone breaking the law, you have a civic duty to report him or her to the authorities, do you not?

Fourth, there are some people who, like the Super Bowl streaker, just don't belong on the playing field. Between us, Sarah and I have years of experience with performing arts, missions, music ministry, and nonprofits. Those are difficult lines of work with high standards of fairness and integrity. And, like all professions, they are answerable in some degree to laws and government statutes. We've been involved with legitimate organizations that are actually achieving something in these fields, and we've seen how hard they work and how much they sacrifice. So it really shouldn't be a surprise that I get angry when someone comes along claiming to operate a nonprofit organization involved in performing arts, music ministry, and missions — and acts as though the rules don't apply to him. (Which, as we'll soon see, is exactly what Q. thinks.) In any profession — but especially in the ones we're talking about — if you don't run an ethical, aboveboard operation, you're not only getting in the way, you're giving the profession a bad name and making things more difficult for everyone else.

That, then, is the rationale for my continued pursuit of justice for Q. I hope it's sufficient.

After e-mailing the Secretary of State's Charities Division, I followed up with a phone call and spoke with one of the employees there, Ms. Makenice. I patiently walked her through Q.'s Web site to make sure she understood the exact nature of my complaint and saw the evidence for it. She explained my options, which I'll classify as follows:

Softball. I could follow the Charities Division's process for dealing with unregistered nonprofits. Ms. Makenice would send a letter notifying Q. of the problem, and he'd have 30 days to respond. If he didn't, she'd send another letter — and if he was still out of compliance after 15 days, she'd refer the matter to the state Attorney General's office.

Hardball. I could file a complaint directly with the state Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division.

I chose softball. As I've admitted earlier, I'm a conflict avoider, and softball seemed less confrontational. It also kept my name out of the proceedings, which was not an option with hardball. I kept an eye on Q.'s Web site (the tax-deductible claim stayed right where it was) and patiently waited 30 days. When I called the Charities Division I learned that Ms. Makenice was out sick. It was a couple more weeks before I got in touch with her. Here's what I learned:

According to Ms. Makenice, her office received no response to the first letter, so she sent a second one, per the procedure she'd described to me. Following the second letter, she had a phone conversation with E. — who told her, "We don't solicit funds." Upon hearing that, Ms. Makenice closed her case file.

I could hardly believe it, but that's what she told me. Apparently all you have to do to get the Charities Division off your back is tell them a lie. All I can say is that I hope other branches of Washington state government have similar attitudes toward law enforcement. If the Highway Patrol ever pulls me over for speeding, perhaps I'll just say, "But officer, this isn't my car."

Ms. Makenice also said it wasn't clear whether Q. would have to register with her office in order to raise funds. It would depend, she said, on how much he collected and whether he had any kind of church affiliation. So not only had she accepted a statement from E. that directly contradicted the evidence, she'd also failed to keep her eye on the ball: My complaint concerned Q.'s false claim that donations to his organization were tax deductible, not whether he was registered with the Charities Division.

I redirected Ms. Makenice to the pages on Q.'s Web site that contained the solicitation and the tax-deductible claim — at which point she suggested that she'd have her colleague get in touch with Q. And so ended that conversation.

I called Ms. Makenice again a few days later. She said her colleague had spoken with Q. and E., and it now sounded as though Q. planned to register with her office after all — even though he and E. were going to move to Taiwan in a few months to begin preparations for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Furthermore, they now claimed that the artists whose CDs they were selling — B. and Six Steps to Heaven — were responsible for handling tax-deduction issues, since they were the ones receiving the money. Finally, she said, Q. and E. had told her they had a pretty good idea who'd reported them to her office, since they knew a particular person was "out to get them."

"I guess that'd be big bad me," I replied. Then as politely as I could, I reminded her that the illegal solicitations were still on Q.'s Web site, despite E.'s previous denial, and that Q. and E. were obviously the ones collecting the funds. The first thing I did after hanging up the phone was to jump on Q.'s Web site and order another copy of B.'s CD. The one I ordered two months earlier had not arrived — but, on the other hand, the transaction was never processed on my credit card. This time I used PayPal to send the money, and when I printed out the receipt, E.'s name and e-mail address were on it. Here was proof in black and white. Within a few minutes, however, I received the following e-mail from E.:

We do not accept and / or take the paypal money. We will be sending back this money, as neither the artist nor ourselves prefer to do any business of any nature with you. Now you are being like a stalker and if need be we will seek advice to deal with you in the appropriate manner.

That E., such a charming lass. So ordering CDs was equivalent to stalking? Hey, whatever happened to "We forgive you, we forgive you, and we forgive you!"? At least she did follow through and refund my payment. I faxed the receipt and the unpleasant e-mail to Ms. Makenice and followed up with one last phone call to her, although I was beginning to sense that it wouldn't do any good.

And I was right. Nasty e-mail and proof that she'd been had were not enough to motivate Ms. Makenice. "There's nothing else we can do for you," she said. "I'd advise you to call the Attorney General's office."

Frustrated, I expressed to Ms. Makenice my profound disappointment that the rules of softball seemed to have changed after I started playing it. The 45-day compliance period had long since expired, and Q. was still out of compliance — so why the heck hadn't Ms. Makenice herself kicked the matter upstairs to the Attorney General's office, as she had said she would do? In reply I got a rather long-winded sob story about how overworked Ms. Makenice and her colleague were. This didn't make any sense to me and still doesn't. If she was so overworked, wouldn't that be all the more reason to send the case to the Attorney General? That would be one less case on Ms. Makenice's desk, by my reckoning.

Afer saying goodbye to Ms. Makenice, I considered my options. I'd resisted hardball because I couldn't do it anonymously, but that no longer seemed like an issue. My cover was pretty well blown with the latest CD order, and if I didn't contact the Attorney General's office, no one else would. So I might as well take that step. What harm could it do?

Well, that's a tale for another entry.

38. Lies, Damned Lies, and Politics

2006-02-10T17:17:00.000-08:00

Is that the worst this letter doth contain?
——Henry VI, Part I, IV.i

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands:
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.
——Othello, III.iii

The other day I saw a news item about a fellow here in Washington state who had assembled a small collection of slot machines in his recreation room. He had them up and running, and it seems his family liked to play slots — using tokens, not real coins — for fun. What the hey, it was cheaper than going to Vegas.

One day, though, he had a yard sale and made the mistake of leaving the garage door open. Someone spotted the machines and called the Washington State Gambling Commission, which sent the man a cease-and-desist letter, ordering him to get rid of the machines. Slots are illegal in Washington, even in our ever-proliferating casinos. Never mind that no actual money was actually changing hands.

I'm not bringing this up to comment on the fairness of that particular law. I just thought the assiduousness of the Gambling Commission, in response to a yard-sale shopper's complaint, provided a nice contrast to the behavior of the Secretary of State's Charities Division and, as we'll see in a minute, the Attorney General's Consumer Protection Division in response to my complaint.

I'll just get the mea culpas out of the way now and admit that I probably could have played a more strategic game of hardball. I had, in fact, already spoken earlier to someone who worked for the Consumer Protection Division, back when I was trying to decide between hardball and softball. But now instead of calling that person back, I used an online complaint form. The day after I did this, my brother-in-law in Atlanta died. Sarah and I were thrust into the sort of harried, last-minute travel plans that a death in the family forces upon you, and my feud with Q. had to take a back seat for a while. I had intended to follow up my complaint with a phone call, but never got around to it. I did check Q.'s Web sites nearly every day in Atlanta, and noticed that the tax-deductible claim suddenly disappeared on June 30, 2006.

When I got back from Atlanta, there was a letter from a Miss Understanding of the Consumer Protection Division (she wasn't the person I'd spoken to before), stating that she'd received my complaint and forwarded it to Q. I thought about calling her to see if she had any questions or comments about my case, but it was a busy week and Sarah and I weren't exactly finished grieving for her brother. Again I didn't call.

Keep in mind, dear reader, that the main purpose of the Consumer Protection Division is not to police the fundraising activities of nonprofits. (That is the Charities Division's job, but Ms. Makenice had already dropped the ball and then punted it.) The Consumer Protection Division, as the name suggests, is more concerned with helping people who've been ripped off recover their money. And since E. had at least been smart enough to refund my attempted donation, I wasn't actually out any bucks. All I had to complain about was Q.'s false tax-deductibility claim, which was on his site when I made the complaint, but was there no longer (although I had printed it out). I had no proof, though, that anyone else had even tried to donate money through the Web site in question. It's not exactly a high-profile site. I was able to determine that I was the first person to send money to E.'s PayPal account in several years, which tends to support the notion that I am the only person who even gives a rip about how she collects donations.

After another week I got a second letter from Miss Understanding, stating that her office was closing its case. She enclosed a reply letter she had received from Q., dated June 30, 2006, which is worth quoting at length:

1. ____ is an organization that organizes concerts at various venues during the Olympics in the host city. Every two years since the location of the Olympics changes, we setup a new HQ, new name that correlates to that Olympics theme but doesn't infringe on any Olympics copyrights in place. We setup accounts and paperwork and non-profit status either in the host country or the surrounding region. Once the Olympics is over though we close all accounts, offices and such. ____.org page only serves as a stable website for Volunteers from each Olympics, media sources and musicians to be able to find out information about the next Olympics when it is setup, since they won't know this information from one Olympics to the next. I hope that makes sense.

2. ____, even though it is only a centralized information website for volunteers and such because I personally reside in the state of Washington between Olympic events, even though this is an in between time I have filled out the proper paperwork with the state. The form was the "Optional Statement for an Exempt Organization" and the registration # was _____. Which was sent to them prior to us receiving this complaint.

I'm beginning to get the picture here: Q. seems to think that he needn't register as a nonprofit with the state or federal government because he operates mostly overseas. Which is nonsense: Regardless of what he did in other countries, he was soliciting money in U.S. currency using a Washington address, so that activity was subject to U.S. and state laws. The form he mentions is something you can file if your organization is exempt from registering with the Charities Division. Once you file it, of course, it's public information, so I had Ms. Makenice send me a copy. I was curious to see just what Q. might have said to convince her that he didn't have to register with her office.

And when I received the form, I was a little surprised at the answer. I figured he'd try to claim an exemption for religious activities, as provided for in the Charitable Solicitations Act (RCW 19.09). But in order to qualify for that exemption, your organization has to be either a registered 501(c)(3) or affiliated with one — and Q. and E. affirm in black and white on this form that they are not so registered or so affiliated. (Which is as good as admitting that their solicitations were illegal... but I digress.) Instead, they claim another exemption under RCW 19.09: their nonprofit is an all-volunteer organization raising less than $25,000 a year.

I can think of two problems with this. First, as I've mentioned, the prospectus for Q.'s film project, which I downloaded from his nonprofit's Web site, specifically budgets $70,000 to finance the film and associated mission trips, which were supposed to take place in 2006 according to one of the Web sites. It looks more than a little fishy to tell the Charities Division that you raise less than $25,000 annually when you've already issued a prospectus claiming that you intend to spend almost three times that amount this year.

(Honestly, from what I've seen I don't think Q. is capable of raising $70,000 in a year. What he told the Charities Division is probably closer to the truth than what he put in the prospectus. On the other hand, there were 20 Americans in Q.'s Greece entourage. If we assume all their airfares were equal to what I paid for Sarah's, then we can do the math: 20 x $1,352 = $27,040 for airfare alone. However, Sarah's airfare may not count as a donation, since I made out the money order to the travel agent — and several other folks were probably in the same boat. Christian and, I think, Pandora, flew into Athens from elsewhere in Europe, so their tickets were probably less. But Qedem's travel expenses were about $2,250 per person according to what they told Sarah. And these figures don't even account for Cory and the Russians.)

Second, there's the uncomfortable fact that B. and Holly (and perhaps other band members as well) were both supposed to be paid for their participation in the recording project and the Greece trip. Which would mean that Q.'s organization wasn't all-volunteer. Holly never received the promised payment, but I don't know whether the same is true for B. It's possible, of course, that if B. ever has been paid, the funds came from an account owned by Q.'s record label, or some other source not connected to the nonprofit. But then again, Q. or E. allegedly told the Charities Division that donations solicited on their site were going directly to B. and Six Steps to Heaven. Oh, how the mind reels! I can tell you one thing: I'd hate to be Q.'s accountant.

Q. claims above that he filed this form with the Charities Division "prior to us receiving this complaint" from the Attorney General's office. The form is actually dated the day after I filed that complaint online. So the truth of Q.'s claim depends on how he was notified. If he got an automatic e-mail notification, then he's lying. If he was notified by mail or telephone, he's telling the truth.

Finally, what Q. says above about his Web site isn't quite true: he did use it to solicit donations, and he kept it remarkably devoid of useful information about the Winter Olympics in Torino.

3. The person making the complaint Mr Martin Stillion is familiar to us. Two years ago Mr Stillion was a performer at one of our Olympic concert series in Athens, Greece. We asked him to leave because he had several violent anger outbursts...

Hey, wait a minute. I had three angry outbursts: two minor ones on Sunday, Aug. 22, and one major one at 1:30 a.m. or thereabouts on Friday morning, Aug. 27, all three of which are documented in this blog. As far as I know, Q. witnessed only this last outburst. None of these outbursts were violent. I never struck or harmed any person or object.

and _______ on several occasions.

I'm sorry I can't be more forthcoming about _______ in the above excerpt. Suffice it to say, it's a calumny of the worst imaginable kind, accusing me of an activity that is in its more virulent forms both a damnable, contemptible sin and a heinous crime. The accusation is also, of course, entirely false. More later about that. As I said the last time I quoted Q., I couldn't make up stuff like this if I tried. But Q.'s imagination apparently rushes in where mine fears to tread.

This was two years ago. We have told him several times that ourselves, other musicians and volunteers at our events would prefer not to be associated or contacted by him.

Not true. The first time and only time I'd been told such a thing was in E.'s e-mail reply to my latest attempted donation.

With this current situation it is apparent that we need to file an "Anti-Harassment order" (AKA Restraining Order). Which will be done within the next two weeks in King County.

I looked up the form he mentions, and actually was worried for the next two weeks that he might follow through with it. I also sort of hoped he would. You see, I hadn't harassed Q. in the least. I'd sent him and E. six e-mail messages in two years — donation attempts included — all of which were brief, cordial, and to the point. We'd had no other direct contact. Writing and talking about Q., and reporting him to state agencies, is not harassment. Once filled out and submitted, the antiharassment order constitutes a sworn statement. So if Q. did file it, that would be an act of perjury on his part, and you can bet I'd point this out to the judge at the court hearing. But the two weeks came and went, followed by five more weeks so far, and still no restraining order has been filed.

4. Please look at all the websites listed in the complaint. If any mis-stated information was on the web, it had been removed prior to receiving this complaint,...

False. The first day I noticed the solicitations were gone was June 30, the same day Q. wrote his letter. In his haste he also removed B.'s preview CD from his online store.

although the email address, our names and other vital information was never listed online, ever. The only way he had this was because of our prior relationship.

This actually is true. It brings up an interesting point, though: RCW 19.09 requires organizations that solicit to disclose the name of the person making the solicitation, as well as that person's place of business. By admitting that he never put this information on his site, Q. is giving further evidence that he violated RCW 19.09. Not that anyone in state government seems to care.

Now let's revisit the most disturbing part of Q.'s letter: the accusation that I engaged in "_______ on several occasions." I beg you to keep in mind, dear reader, that this was a letter Q. sent to someone who works in the office of THE ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE STATE OF WASHINGTON, for pity's sake, and it is the professional duty of every state Attorney General to prosecute, convict, and incarcerate people who engage in _______. You can well imagine how shaken and angry this made me. So I finally made that phone call to Miss Understanding.

When you file a complaint with the Consumer Protection Division, it too is considered a sworn statement. There's a line on the form that begins "I testify under penalty of perjury." So my first question to Miss Understanding was whether Q.'s letter to her was also regarded as a sworn statement. It contained, as I've taken some pains to point out, several falsehoods and one outrageous whopper. So if he had made those statements under penalty of perjury, then by golly, it was time to file a perjury complaint.

I thought this was a fairly straightforward question, but Miss Understanding did not seem to understand it — and even after I explained it to her thoroughly, she refused to give me a straight answer. I finally gathered from her evasive blabber that the answer was no. In other words, I was legally obligated to tell the truth in my complaint, but the same obligation did not apply to Q. in his response. Which strikes me as fundamentally unfair, but what the heck.

My next question concerned the accusation of _______. It was my opinion that this accusation, a false statement with grave potential to harm my reputation in society, could well be considered libelous, and I said so to Miss Understanding. I'll be danged if she didn't reply in a manner that suggested she did not understand the word "libel." How one gets a job in the Attorney General's office without knowing basic legal terms is beyond me. So I called her attention to the line about _______ and assured her that I was entirely innocent. I managed at least to obtain her assurance that a rogue accusation like this was not going to result in a criminal investigation of me.

That's the good news. The bad news is that Miss Understanding didn't seem inclined to investigate Q. either. In the end, the only positive outcome of my pursuit of justice for Q. was that he finally removed the improper solicitations from his Web sites. Not quite the victory I was shooting for, but I'll take it.

Instead of going through state agencies, perhaps I should have referred Q. directly to the IRS. (I guess I thought state agencies would be more responsive, but what do I know?) After all, I'm pretty sure Q. was breaking federal law as well as state law by attempting to collect "tax-deductible" donations when he didn't have 501(c)(3) status. Not only that, the exact words on his Web site were "100% tax deductible," which wouldn't be true even if he were registered. If a charity provides an item in exchange for donations, the fair market value of the item has to be subtracted before calculating the tax deduction. So if a CD was worth $8 and Q. gave it to you for a $10 donation, then only $2 of your donation would be legally tax deductible. If the CD was worth $10 or more, you couldn't deduct anything.

Assorted other claims about Q. have come to light in the past two years, none of them positive. I heard from a studio owner who let Q. do some recording in his studio and said he never got paid for it, and I talked to a graphic designer who said he finally got paid a year and a half after designing a CD package for Q. I even heard from one of the band members who disappeared just before we went to Greece. Surprise! Q. had asked him, at the last minute, to pay for his own plane ticket — or to get his church to sponsor him. This band member also remains uncompensated for his studio time, although after about two years he finally received partial reimbursement for travel expenses (he lives on the other side of the state and had to drive all the way to Seattle for sessions and practices).

I should note that some of the other band members did succeed in getting money from their churches to help with trip expenses — which no doubt contributed to the shame and embarrassment of being involved with Loudmouth at all. It's one thing to spend your own money on a debacle, and another thing to spend money collected from your fellow parishioners and given to you by church leaders in a good-faith show of support.

During July 2006 I did a lot of digging, in anticipation of Q. taking me to court with a harassment complaint. I uncovered some details about his career before he started hawking Bible software and tormenting musicians: While still a Bible college student in the early 1990s, Q. founded a telecommunications software company. His software was a sort of primitive version of Skype and other VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) services. I don't think VoIP is quite the right term, since Q.'s software didn't actually use Internet protocols. (Dial-up over telephone lines was pretty much the only Internet protocol available when he started the company, so VoIP would've been pretty much pointless.) Instead, it emulated telephone switching signals to create "free calling networks," enabling users to place calls between various Seattle suburbs without having to pay local tolls to the phone company. He also had a product ($24 a pop) that enabled users to make free calls from pay phones, among other things.

At its high point, Q.'s company claimed 40,000 customers in the Seattle area. Several newspaper articles about the company were published in the mid-1990s, mostly in Seattle but also in Houston and Southern California — both markets that Q. had his eye on back then. Both in these articles and on the company's Web site (remnants of which can still be found if you know where to look), the company claimed its products and practices were legal, even though they used telephone lines owned by telephone companies in a way that effectively deprived those companies of expected revenue. Sometimes Q. and his partners even described themselves as "telecommunications anarchists" and claimed that their goal was "world domination." I love the irony of someone involved in such a bottom-feeding capitalist venture calling himself an anarchist. Not to mention the contradiction between anarchy and world domination. Isn't the point of anarchy that nobody should dominate anybody else?

Sometime during the 1990s Q. also started his secondhand office equipment buying/selling/recycling business, which he still operates. Although this doesn't sound like the most exciting line of work, it does seem to provide a worthwhile and needed service in a straightforward fashion, which is more than I can say for the software.

In late 1997 the software company vanished. I still don't know why. Perhaps legislators closed whatever legal loopholes had allowed Q.'s software to circumvent phone charges. Perhaps ISDN (remember ISDN?) and DSL began to render his software obsolete. Perhaps the phone companies remapped their calling areas, or took him to court, or perhaps they purposely tied up his lines with fake calls (as Q. accused them of doing) so that he lost business. Perhaps his customers got sick of hearing a software ad every time they called in to use his free calling networks. Or perhaps Q. turned his attention to Bible software and Christian music, and lost interest in being a telecommunications anarchist.

Whatever the reason, if Q. sounds like someone who habitually does things that, even if legal, aren't quite on the level, you can understand why. He's had lots of practice. For now I'm done being Q.'s watchdog, although I reserve the right to reactivate if he does something else worthy of investigation, or tries to make good on any of his empty threats to pursue legal action against me.

Now if only I knew whether he collects slot machines...